Enys Men (Mark Jenkin, 2022) (Patreon)

One benefit of going to commercial cinemas to see movies no one else wants to is that, when a few other people do show up, it can create an unexpected bond. I had a nice chat in the lobby with a couple of folks who'd also just watched Enys Men, and most of that chat consisted of just articulating what we'd seen and trying to suss out what Mark Jenkin might be up to. However, one thing we agreed on right off the bat is that, in the long run, NEON is doing Enys Men no favors by trying to pass it off as elevated horror. This ain't Midsommer or The Lighthouse. It's something else entirely.

One major difference has to do with structure. Although Enys Men bears a certain resemblance to the supernatural tradition in British cinema (especially the films of Nicolas Roeg), it does not follow a clear narrative logic. It is much more of a film poem, organized through visual and auditory refrains that gradually mutate with each iteration. I briefly mentioned this on Twitter, but the film Enys Men actually reminds me of is Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon. Like that avant-garde masterwork, Enys Men is focused on the troubled psychology of a woman, here known as the Volunteer (Mary Woodvine). She has a set of activities she must undertake daily, but the film presents them less as responsibilities than as rituals and talismans, things that she repeats in order to manage an unspecified trauma as well as to stave off the ghosts of the island's unconscious.

Part of why I think it's important to frame Enys Men as poetry rather than prose is that Jenkin plays with certain thematic tropes -- in particular, the presence of the dead and the nonlinear slippage of time. But if one chose to analyze the film's plot, one would soon see that, unlike mainstream ghost / time travel narratives, Enys Men doesn't abide by rules. To take the most obvious examples, we can discern that the Girl (Flo Crowe), who appears in the house and on the roof, is the Volunteer's younger self. But if she is a ghost, does this mean she died on the island as a young woman? If that's the case, what explains the Volunteer's middle-aged existence? And if the Boatman (Edward Rowe) was the Volunteer's lover who died at sea, was he involved with the older or younger woman before his death?

We can leave these questions to the dullards over at CinemaSins. Jenkin is clearly concerned with inducing a psychological state for his viewers, one that collapses clear distinctions between past and present, the living and the dead. Gradually the rare flora the Volunteer is studying are compromised by a lichen growing on them, something not quite parasitic but indicative that the forces of the island are hardier than these anomalous, plastic-looking flowers. When the lichen starts to form across the Volunteer's body, it suggests many possibilities. Is she dead in the ground, already one with Enys Men? Are the flowers a manifestation of her trauma, something she is responsible for tending but cannot save? Or is she the lichen, spreading out over the island and enveloping it with the force of decay?

So although the comparison may simplify some things, I do think that Enys Men and Meshes share a certain Freudian DNA. Both films are cinematic death dreams, scenarios in which a specific location serves as a kind of unconscious holder of trauma. The Volunteer keeps seeing emanations from the island's past -- a girl's chorus, a severe preacher (John Woodvine), and deep in the island's guts, the spirits of drowned miners. Like the shared marital home in Meshes, the island is both a physical and a psychological space, something one can inhabit even though it might actually exist in the deepest emotional recesses of the protagonist. 

The Volunteer's house serves as a container for the Volunteer's fugue state,  where ordinary actions (making tea, listening to the radio, reading by candlelight in bed) are endlessly repeated, time duly logged ("NO CHANGE") until enough anomalies accumulate, demanding an eventual rupture. Directly across from the house, the island itself bears its own mark of trauma. A menhir juts out of a hilltop, a rock that is said to memorialize those lost at sea. Does this pertain to some specific Cornish lore? I cannot say. But the rock, silhouetted against the sky, seems to be something more than a funereal marker. It is like a cork, placed there in the vain hope of keeping the spirits of Enys Men safely contained. Perhaps this is also yet another function of the Volunteer, to witness on behalf of the dead so they can experience some semblance of rest.