Enys Men (2023) review: Mark Jenkin’s Cornish horror is astounding, experimental, horror craft that impacts long after first viewing

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Few years have been as consistently good for horror as 2022, and now 2023 has started off with M3GAN…and for that matter with one of the best January’s in some time, delivering a staggering continuing quality of mainstream and independent films. And they don’t get any more independent than Enys Men. Figuratively and literally.
Set in 1973, on an uninhabited Island off the Cornish coast, the film centres on a wildlife volunteer (Mary Woodvine), who makes daily observations of a rare flower, but as her familiar surroundings begin to twist into something else entirely, she enters a dark descent into a nightmarish disintegration of reality.
Enys Men, which is Cornish for Stone Island, is a film that provokes very strong opinions. Mark Jenkin‘s psychological Cornish folk horror is naturally going to be compared in mere concept alone to Robin Hardy’s towering The Wicker Men but is a far different beast once you sit and watch it.
A perturbing disassembly of time, isolation and the voices of the lost and fallen, this is a film that some will walk away from shaken, others infuriated, and some troubled. However, like tainted soil, the extent of this film’s horrors are perhaps not clear until later on, as its psychologically shattering moments have percolated from your eyes and festered in your brain, eventually taking it over like a cinematic cordyceps fungus.
Mary Woodvine is excellent as the haunted and alone lead character, who remains nameless, adding further to film’s themes of the gone and forgotten calling out from beneath the soil. Her performance, like the slim number of others in the film (including Woodvine’s father John Woodvine), all contribute to this unmatched experience, where humanity has faded before the enduring, almost mystic power of the land, but their cycles of grief, pain and separation are endless and enduring.
Beautifully shot in 16mm grainy colour, with Jenkin’s imposing soundtrack blending in with the fizz of a radio transmission, the spit of a motor, the calls of the birds and the crashing of the seemingly always rough waves of the sea, this film so wonderfully evokes its natural setting and displays its power, while also reflecting its era better than so many other films that have attempted such feats.
It feels once again, after Jenkin’s 2019 feature film debut Bait, like a very authentic Cornish voice from a bygone age, as well as a modern one. The films transfixing passages of time showing no ending and no beginning, they just eerily tick away, as the natural environment around continues about its own business, dwarfing these people that are and once were.
Its plot relies on both the intimate details, and your own patience in burrowing beneath the surface to arrange them. But once you do, the crying of the tormented spirits that populate the frame, and which are doomed to forever reside on this picturesque yet naturally savage coastal island, may forever stay with you wailing. In fact, on a windy night, you may find yourself hearing them in the distance.
A film to not just watch but allow to soak into your very being, and to take you over, if you are to get to the very heart of its challenging, dark, disturbing and engrossing ideas. Quietly, poetically, unforgettably, impressive. Crashing seas never felt so alarming.
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