Enys Men Is Very, Very Strange (And I Can’t Stop Thinking About It)

Enys Men is a really, really strange film.

And I don’t say that lightly; I love a weird movie, a strange little slice of cinema that basically presents a bunch of puzzle pieces scattered across celluloid and asks you, the viewer, to put them together. Enys Men, though – released last year and directed by Cornish director Mark Jenkin – is one of the most distinctly odd films I’ve seen in a long time, and it’s been rotating around my brain since I watched it a couple of days ago. I’m using this article as a chance to exorcise some of the roots it’s grown into my head, and also, to tell you to watch it, because it’s really interesting, gorgeously made, and strikingly stylised.

Enys Men follows an unnamed volunteer who spends a few weeks (depending on how you view the film’s non-linear, era-hopping narrative) monitoring the growth of a few flowers on a small island off the coast of Cornwall (the title, Enys Men, is Cornish for Stony Island – the movie was also the first to be released with both English and Cornish promotional material, which is a cool little detail), when visions from her past and the apparent past of the island begin to haunt her.

Shot on 16mm film, there’s an eerie, retro feel to Enys Men – the best way I can describe it is seeming as though it’s one of the movies that would have driven Niamh Algar insane in Censor. These distant parts of the UK, the small islands scattered with pieces of history and remnants of ancient, long-defunct cultures and societies, are naturally great settings for horror movies, and Jenkin makes great use of the quiet, his sound design cutting through the soft sounds of waves on the rocks with an ancient, rattling generator, discomforting and deliberately wrong-footing the viewer.

But what does it all mean? Everyone who watches this movie will come away with a different interpretation – that’s exactly what these kinds of stories are for, dumping a collection of narrative shards into your lap for you to piece together in a way that makes sense in your mind. So, here’s what makes sense in mine.

Enys Men – the stony island of the movie’s title – is the main character of this movie. It might seem as though the Volunteer (a brilliant Mary Woodvine) is the centrepiece of this story (if you can call something so oblique and deliberately evasive a story, and not an elaborately executed piece of performance art), but the title gives it away from the jump: everyone in this movie is at the behest of this island, and when viewed through that lens, Enys Men makes a whole lot more sense to me. From the miners killed in a cave-in to the lifeboat crew killed against the stony shores, from the petrol-hoisting deliveryman to the Volunteer’s plucking of a flower, every time someone invades the island, damages it in some way, no matter how small or large, the island retaliates. The island and it’s enroaching lichen comes to claim everything, and it forms a stony, silent backdrop to Jenkin’s bizarre horror, the antagonist and the main character – there before the film begins and long after it ends, too.

Enys Men is a very strange movie, but it’s one I found really rewarding, too – I’d love to hear your interpretations of the film if you’ve seen it, and if not, I’d recommend giving this odd little Cornish curio a try.

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By Lou MacGregor

(header image via Rolling Stone)