Enys Men

Product Information

BBC Culture spoke to Jenkin about his new film and the preoccupations of his work. "I was a rural kid," he suggests when asked of his influences, "and I suppose I always seemed to be attracted to the dark side of things, a desire to be a bit scared, but to also look at the flip side of the idyll. Part of that is a reaction against the way that Cornwall is idealised and romanticised." Sitges' Universe Expands With New Titles From the Most Contemporary, Audacious Fantastic Genre". sitgesfilmfestival.com. 28 July 2022 . Retrieved 8 October 2023.

For sound effects, Jenkin used a synthesizer, wired up to a tape loop, which created echoes and sound distortions. He stood on a piece of fake wooden flooring to record footsteps. A wildlife volunteer’s (Mary Woodvine) daily observations of a rare flower take a dark turn into the strange and metaphysical, forcing both her and viewers to question what is real and what is nightmare. Is the landscape not only alive but sentient? Enys Men is shot in colour of a fierce, rich sort, and looks as if it was made in the year it is set: 1973. It is not exactly a horror film, despite some spasms of disquiet, but an uncanny evocation of how, when left utterly on our own, we spiral inwards into our memories, dreams and fears. Mary Woodvine (who was the well-off second-home owner in Bait) plays a woman living on a remote Cornish island, in a simple cottage whose future condition of moss-covered dereliction she appears to foretell or hallucinate. She is apparently researching the state of some wildflowers at the cliff-edge, every day inspecting their condition and taking their soil temperature, and solemnly recording the unvarying results in pencil in a ledger. Woodvine looks capably solitary and strong, weathered and at one with the landscape. The volunteer’s isolation and steady concentration sets a deliberate, incremental pace. Then lichen appears on the flowers like poison, spreading to the livid scar on her stomach. As Jenkin explains in an elegant commentary with Mark Kermode which otherwise insists on mystery, she soon slips into a mirror-image of her house, and her mindscape shifts.

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Kermode, Mark (15 January 2023). "Enys Men review – Mark Jenkin's Cornish psychodrama will sweep you away". The Guardian . Retrieved 15 January 2023. The film is set in 1973 on an uninhabited island off the Cornish coast. Mary Woodvine plays a wildlife volunteer’s who’s daily observations of a rare flower take her on a metaphysical journey which causes her to question what is real and what is torment. As identified by Macfarlane and others, the eerie acts as a kind of counter-tradition to the romantic Pastoralism of English art; rather than portraying the English countryside as a place of chocolate-box fantasy, it has often zoned in on specific rural localities and tried to convey their haunted essences that are beyond the understanding of urbanite considerations. Jenkin's film is a perfect, anti-romantic expression of Cornish eeriness. "There is certainly a level of abstraction that comes from shooting small-gauge film," he says of his trusty Bolex 16mm camera, "but most of the eerie comes later in the process, [in] how the images bump up against each other and most importantly how the sound works with, and against, the image.” The Duchy of Cornwall (1938, 15 mins): a rapid survey of early Cornish history looks at the county's language, landscape and industries

a b "Enys Men: Film poster a Cornish language breakthrough". BBC News. 6 December 2022 . Retrieved 15 January 2023. Enys Men premiered in the Directors' Fortnight section of the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. [1] [4] [6] [7] [8] In Bodmin, the film's opening night sold out within hours, and the film was a box office success for cinemas across Cornwall. [5] Enys Men is the much anticipated follow-up to Bait, Jenkin’s breakthrough success which earned him a BAFTA for Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer in 2020. Enys Men, the new feature from visionary Cornish filmmaker Mark Jenkin, to be released by the BFI on 13 January 2023". bfi.co.uk . Retrieved 8 October 2023. In an article for Far Out, Calum Russell wrote that Enys Men feels "like the spiritual continuation of Bait", Jenkin's previous film, and "more like an innovative art installation than a piece of narrative fiction". [14] Accolades [ edit ] Year

Side guide

Having a middle-aged female lead – Woodvine is 55 – in an eerie horror film feels hugely refreshing. The actor says she is ready for “the first person who tells me I’m brave not to wear makeup” – and comically bares her teeth. She often feels invisible in the industry. “When I’m going for jobs, I still have people telling me they need to see more of what I do – and I’ve been doing this, and lots of theatre, for more than 30 years.” The huge audience of middle-aged women who watch films is often neglected, too, she adds. “Maybe some of them will watch this, and go: ‘Oh my God, somebody in this genre that’s more like me.’” Special features on the Dual Format Edition include an audio commentary by Mark Jenkin and Mark Kermode, recently filmed interviews, two complementary archival films and more.

You can find out more about how Falmouth University supports independent cinema through its Sound/ Image CinemaLab here. Pippa Considine The Guardian’s review by Peter Bradshaw describes it as “a supremely disquieting study of solitude….Jenkin’s style is so unusual, so unadorned, it feels almost like a manuscript culture of cinema. There is real artistry in it.” John Nugent at Empire magazine describes him as “one of the most exciting cinematic voices in the UK right.” Lemercier, Fabien (27 April 2022). "Scents of Europe and discoveries at the Cannes Directors' Fortnight". cineuropa.org . Retrieved 8 October 2023.Looking beyond these screen influences, continuity can also be drawn between Jenkin's film and eerie work in other media that is similarly focused on Cornwall. With its array of menhir (human-produced, upright standing stones) dotting the landscape and rich folklore, the location has inspired many artists. Eileen Agar used Cornish landscapes (as well as physical debris from the coastline) to make an incredible array of eerie and esoteric work across many forms, while sculptor Barbara Hepworth played off the standing stones and shapes within the Cornish landscape to create a celebrated catalogue of eerie sculptures. Even novels such as Over Sea, Under Stone (1965) by Susan Cooper recognise the eerie potential of the location. "And then," wrote Cooper, "looming over the dark brow of the headland, they saw the outline of the standing stones… As they drew nearer, the stones seemed to grow, pointing silently to the sky, like vast tombstones set on end." She could easily be describing visuals seen in Enys Men. Jenkin has a second preoccupation alongside his analogue sensibility: the landscape and culture of his native Cornwall. While Bait was a deeply modern tale of Cornish gentrification told with old technology, Enys Men reflects that same local interest but with stronger cohesion between the old filmic form and its period setting.