The latest Little Movie That Could — and it’d be hard to shrink any smaller — Mark Jenkin’s Cornish folk-horror chestnut Enys Men, is something of a miniature masterpiece of mood, texture, and elliptical frisson. That is, in fact, all it is: If you’re in dire need of other things, like complex plotting or witty dialogue, or even genuine genre thrills, seek elsewhere. Jenkin’s film would feel like a throwback if in fact there ever were an era in which such compact, spare, elusive films were routinely made by feverish hermits on deserted islands, in Cornwall, no less. You absolutely get the sense of visiting a private obsession — that the movie was made by an unfashionably fixated loner in the middle of an uncivilized nowhere, who answered to nobody but the sea and the wind.
Enys Men — Cornish for “stone island,” which is where we spend the whole movie — is the latest in Jenkin’s decades-long, underseen exploration of Cornish working-class landscape and peoples. (His last feature, 2019’s Bait, immediately established him in contemporary Brit film culture as an authentic new voice, though he’d been crafting indigenous shorts and features since 2002.) It’s an odd breakout film — a horror movie absent of scares, a psychological dream film light on character, a nearly wordless mood piece about the malingering ghosts of history. If you’ve been Hoovered in by the trailer, you have a sense of what’s on offer: Jenkin’s offbeat, super-intimate, entirely analog visual strategy, without very much concern for narrative cargo.
Mary Woodvine, a weathered Brit character stalwart who’s been a favorite of Jenkin’s, stars as a nameless woman on an uninhabited coastal island, working as a “volunteer” (according to the credits) monitoring soil temperatures and keeping a log. It’s 1973, and her existence consists entirely of trudging the island’s rocky terrain, checking on an anomalous sprig of cliffside flowers, dropping stones down…
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