Enys Men (2022, Mark Jenkin) (Patreon)

78/100

My highest compliment, in a certain respect: Despite having watched Enys Men at home, I have zero notes to consult, due to an irrational sensation that hitting pause, even for a moment, might somehow kill the movie's hypnotic power. Every shot and cut is rivetingly precise, creating an anxious momentum that's primarily formal rather than narrative. Good thing, too, because cause and effect have a highly tenuous relationship here, as do past, present and future. Jenkin's previous feature, Bait (selected for New Directors / New Films but never released in the U.S.), applied the same visual rigor, employing the same old-school equipment/technique, to a fairly simple village melodrama; while I quite enjoyed that modest exercise, it left me happily unprepared for the significant vault in ambition that this followup represents. Neon's selling it as folk horror, which I suspect is gonna leave a lot of folks disappointed. At the same time, though, everything that it reminded me of—Cattet & Forzani, Eraserhead, Upstream Color—is at least horror-adjacent, and there are apparently some homages to '70s rural English frightfests (The Blood on Satan's Claw, etc.) that escaped my notice. Certainly this 16mm color stock would make it easy to believe, if you didn't know otherwise, that Enys Men had been made around 1973, the year in which it's set. Or, rather, the year in which at least some of its events are reported to be taking place. In any case, don't expect to be frightened—"uncanny" seems like le mot juste, particularly when it comes to Jenkin's unemphatic incorporation of various quasi-supernatural elements. I'll need a second viewing to see whether certain things that I more or less intuited still "feel right" (it's the kind of film that both resists explanation and seems to have been carefully worked out), and look forward to being enveloped again.