I rarely see movies like Mark Jenkin's
Enys Men (2022). More often I dream them.
A sort of double hat trick for its writer-director-cinematographer-editor-composer, it could as easily be described as the ecology of a haunting. In post-synched 16 mm as brilliantly saturated and scratchy as home movies, the woman whom even the credits identify only as the Volunteer (Mary Woodvine) moves through the ritual of her days on a small island off the westernmost coast of Cornwall where she seems to have been stationed as the observer of a clump of rare flowers, nodding their stiff white petals and bright red pistils at the edge of the sea-cliff whose soil temperature she meticulously records in her logbook along with the date and the customary observation
No change. Each time she climbs the loose-bedded step-stones to the cold chimney of the abandoned tin mine, she drops a stone down the drowning black of the shaft just to hear the distant, ricocheting splash. Each time she returns to her slate-shingled, ivy-striped cottage, she fires up the petrol rale of the generator and makes herself a cup of tea while the lucky dip of her cream-colored Dansette breathes through static as if through storm. If the near-total isolation troubles her, she doesn't show it, an elfin figure in her middle fifties with a barely silvered shag of brown hair and a wry weather-grained face, characteristically layered in her white seaman's jumper and red rain jacket and jeans as blue as her Atlantic eyes. Roaming the island between duties, she seems as self-sufficient as her candlelit bedtime reading of Edward Goldsmith and Robert Allen's
A Blueprint for Survival (1972). Periodically she receives supplies and wall-banging sex—she bakes him saffron buns—from the rugged, just as namelessly credited Boatman (Edward Rowe), but no other presence seems as important as the standing stone she crosses in her daily transit of the island, its angular hunch eclipsing her from view so that she seems to pass through rather than behind it. The woodcut in her cottage depicts it ominously rooted among ribs and skulls, but its silhouette seen from her front door suggests rather a cloaked, skirted figure proceeding at tectonic speed. In her dreams, perhaps, it comes like a guiser to her door. The film lingers with animate richness on such details of the natural world, the yolk-flowered tremble of gorse in the sea-breeze, the swing of a black-blacked gull above the ledges, the lichen everywhere scaling and tufting the old walls and outcrops of the stone of the island's name. It lingers the same on apparently unnatural ones, the ring of bal maidens stamping the earth like the engine-clank of the old workings, the miners whose smutched faces peer out at her from beneath the candle-melted brims of their hats, the ruined church clean and whitewashed, its altar piled with branches of flowering hawthorn. What narrative emerges from the sparsely worded script is done with chimes and discontinuities, refrains and layers as reliable as any residual haunting. Actually, however mystifying, contradictory, folded, spindled or mutilated it may look, it is time in this movie that doesn't lie.
Much more of a tone poem than a puzzle for the viewer,
Enys Men inhabits with ambitious directness its nonlinearity that another film might have been tempted to treat more trickily, observing effects before causes and explanations before questions as though there were no more ordinary way to exist in time. On the one hand, some kind of progression can be tracked in the dates of the logbook, the growth of lichen, the wear and tear on a pair of brown walking boots whose brave red laces are part of the film's primary rhyme of colors. On the other, persons attempting to pinpoint the break in its objective hour and a half will be peeved. Time on this island has always—when has it ever done anything else, anywhere—gone strange. As incongruous as her modern, transient figure appears against the immemorial spaces of wind and moor and wave, the Volunteer should be regarded as no less a part of their accumulated fragmentation of personal history with history of place, the history of Cornwall that renders a quizzical joke out of the earnest check-in, "Do you like it here on your own?" She couldn't get a layer of time to herself if she tried with so much of it underfoot in the flaking rust of old rails, a brand name of tinned skimmed milk. Her cottage's history wakes her with the coughing of the burly Miner (Joe Gray) who borrows one of her books to read on the toilet like any careless flatmate before collecting his pick and hammer for a day's work that by his clothes must have gone off shift before the First World War. Its future ghosts in with the teatime broadcast, tinnily exploding any meaningful sense of a present that seemed as factual as her thin strong hand pencilling in
21st April 1973 when the memorial it describes has stood for "nearly fifty years," the harbor-set cenotaph of a loss at sea scheduled for "the 1st of May 1973, near the old miners' quay on the abandoned island of Enys Men." From their rag-white ribbons and stockings, the children who sing
daleth an hav with a drum and sprays of newly broken may-blossom are older in the island than the crew of the late nineteenth century lifeboat who grin still dripping with the sea that drowned them, but behind them the cottage is a gape-roofed, ivy-tumbled ruin, as long uninhabited as it might be explored to this day. At its door in her nightdress as when, face to face with the standing stone on her threshold, she juddered like a frame of gate-stuck film, the Volunteer calls, "Who's there?" She has already been answered. The dark-haired, impassively adolescent Girl (Flo Crowe) perches like a cormorant on the cottage's glass-roofed shed, her corduroys white and her cardigan blue so that a viewer may wonder where the red will come in. The Preacher (the late, great John Woodvine) in his clerical black and white bands addresses her with the solemn injunction of a maritime hymn, the Bible under his arm glistening like the mica-misted granite of the menhir at his side. Picking over the jumbled crags of the shore with their verdigris stains and sunbursts of orange sea-lichen yields a bloodied oilskin and a paint-cracked plank, the foretellings of once and future tragedy. "Are you there? Hello? Can you hear me?" Time isn't even looping so much as it's free-associating, cross-linked even more obviously than a VHF transmission we hear from both ends of the airwaves. Now it folds on a single point, the lace-and-thorn christening of the Baby (Loveday Twomlow) whose addition to the company of the Girl and the Volunteer lends a sort of pitch-shifted triple-goddess vibe to the slowly remembered singing of Philip Paul Bliss' "
Let the Lower Lights Be Burning" in which the Preacher with his aged rock of a voice leads them. Now it merely reverses, an upward glitter of water in the flooded mine. Above all, it seems to be bending toward the event horizon of May Day, a painful double entendre when the failed rescue of the supply boat
Govenek scores the date through from 1897 to 1973, but earth is as powerfully commingled with sea in the changeover as they always have been in the ore-riddled, salt-girt life of Stone Island.
Lichen has appeared on one of the flowers, the Volunteer records for the first time in the last days of April, before discovering a grey-green frill of her own in the white scar that twists across her stomach.
The lichen has grown on the flower, thickening over the seam of her skin like the coat of the standing stone. Her entries stop like a clock:
The lichen has spread to all of the flowers. No change. No change. No change. Its proliferation suggests its own explanation for the haunting, if that's even beginning to sound like the right word for a process as natural as reclamation or grief: a new organism created by the symbiosis of the human and the land. How should it surprise us to see the Volunteer presently step out of the menhir as if leaving the house on her usual rounds? The earth, like the body, keeps the score.
Enys Men was one of the few movies I was able to watch last summer when I had functionally ceased to sleep and was in no state to say anything about it except perhaps to have likened it to the film of a novel never written by Alan Garner or suggested that when Scarristack of Greer Gilman's Cloud gets its film industry up and running, it might produce cinema like Jenkin's. Like a descendant of Powell and Pressburger, it has all the ingredients of folk horror arranged to much more numinous than jump-scaring effect, the enmeshment of memory with the land that does not so much return the repressed as hold it in trust. The sound design is compact with anachronism, both in the sense of cues and voices bleeding back through the picture and the persistent reminder that the AM radio seems to be tuned to the twenty-first century, its local news and football scores cut with Brenda Wootton's "
The Bristol Christ" (1980) and Gwenno's "
Kan Me" (2022), which is incidentally the credits music. The hand-processed film flares and flickers like an unrestored rediscovery, washing nature and spirit photography alike with neg sparkle and the occasional vinegar-red flameout. Sifting its symbol-set of recurrent images and phrases for a key feels beside the point when so much of the movie exists in multiplicity—even the standing stone has a stunt double, its original being
Boswens Menhir—and its makers' resonances may not be mine, but its tactile, liminal landscape is live with them. I thought:
We have become stone in the stone. Earth mastered us. I thought:
But everywhere in the room, that morning, there was a great mess of little twigs and leaves, hawthorn leaves, and rowan. And everywhere a great smell of the sea. I got it from
Kanopy, but in the right region it can be viewed on
BFI Player or
Blu-Ray/DVD and it streams on all the usual
suspects. I may not know enough about lichen to be its ideal audience, but I do care enough about time. This year brought to you by my own backers at
Patreon.
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