Enys Men

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The Duchy of Cornwall (1938, 15 mins): a rapid survey of early Cornish history looks at the county's language, landscape and industries Enys Men is a mind-bending Cornish folk horror set in 1973 that unfolds on an uninhabited island off the Cornish coast. The Duchy of Cornwall (1938, 15 mins): a rapid survey of early Cornish history looks at the county's language, landscape and industries On her way home she passes a single Neolithic standing stone that’s around 10-foot high. It sometimes resembles a hooded woman when seen from a distance. The ivy covered dilapidated house where this woman is living is nearby. She will never be named and is credited only as ‘The Volunteer’ and she’s played by Mary Woodvine, the partner of writer/director Mark Jenkin (who also composed and performed a very atmospheric, Eno-esque ambient score using an analogue synthesizer and a tape loop). In his essay The Weird and the Eerie (2016), the academic Mark Fisher defined eeriness as "constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of presence". That is, for Fisher, the eerie "occurs either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or if there is nothing present when there should be something". Enys Men falls into the former camp, where the island should be absence made manifest, but instead provides spectres of class trauma breaking the volunteer's solitude. The local industry and its demise is the most unsettled ghost of the film.

Woodvine looks capably solitary and strong, weathered and at one with the landscape. The volunteer’s isolation and steady concentration sets a deliberate, incremental pace. Then lichen appears on the flowers like poison, spreading to the livid scar on her stomach. As Jenkin explains in an elegant commentary with Mark Kermode which otherwise insists on mystery, she soon slips into a mirror-image of her house, and her mindscape shifts. This woman’s steady state of hermit-like seclusion is disrupted when she sees lichen emerging from a flower and finds lichen growing on her own skin. She has visions, perhaps of dead miners or lifeboatmen, and also of an elderly priest, singing the hymn Brightly Beams Our Father’s Mercy, with its request to send a light to save “some poor fainting, struggling seaman”. He is played by Woodvine’s father, the distinguished Shakespearean actor John Woodvine. Latif, Leila (20 May 2022). " 'Enys Men' Review: An Artfully Constructed Folk Horror Film About Never-Ending Grief". IndieWire. For Enys Men, all rushes were processed by Kodak Film lab at Pinewood and then scanned by Digital Orchard on its Scanity 4k HDR. The Duchy of Cornwall (1938, 15 mins): the strange beauty of Cornwall resonates through this iconic film from the vaults of the BFI National Archive

Special features on the Dual Format Edition include an audio commentary by Mark Jenkin and Mark Kermode, recently filmed interviews, two complementary archival films and more. Enys Men premiered in the Directors' Fortnight section of the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. [1] [4] [6] [7] [8] In Bodmin, the film's opening night sold out within hours, and the film was a box office success for cinemas across Cornwall. [5] Selected items are only available for delivery via the Royal Mail 48® service and other items are available for delivery using this service for a charge. It is only later in Enys Men that more horrifying visions enter, and, even then, they seem abstract compared to the definite visitations of more typical horror. Sometimes these visions and atmospheres arise for only a second before vanishing, and with little indication that they were there at all. Women in traditional clothing move in unison on the cliff tops, lichen grows from an old scar on the volunteer's body, and the faces of miners peer out of the darkness of old shafts. It is also striking that her character in Enys Men doesn’t suffer the degradations that women often face in horror films. The volunteer remains a largely peaceful presence throughout, even when seven maidens start singing, or a scar on her stomach starts to show signs of other life, or when she responds to a figure singing in a church, played by her father, the 93-year-old actor John Woodvine.

Most edit decisions were made on the shoot. “It has to be then because that’s when everyone’ s creative energy is focused – during the shoot,” says Jenkin on The Film Makers Podcast. On the odd occasion when they hadn’t captured footage to plan, he was forced to go into improvisation mode in post-production.

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Set in 1973, the horror story unfolds on an uninhabited island off the Cornish coast. A wildlife volunteer’s daily observations of a rare flower take a dark turn into the strange and metaphysical, forcing both her and viewers to question what is real and what is nightmare. Is the landscape not only alive but sentient? Enys Men, the new feature from visionary Cornish filmmaker Mark Jenkin, to be released by the BFI on 13 January 2023". bfi.co.uk . Retrieved 8 October 2023.Haunters of the Deep (1984, 61 mins): a Children’s Film Foundation adventure that shares many of the same West Cornwall locations as Enys Men, and made quite an impression on its director The critically acclaimed mind-bending folk horror, Enys Men is set for Dual Format Edition (Blu-ray/DVD) and the simultaneous exclusive streaming release on BFI Player from May. On-stage Q&A interview with Mark Jenkin and Mary Woodvine by film critic Mark Kermode at BFI Southbank (2022)

Her life is quiet, punctuated by the occasional scratchy rumblings of a radio and the starter cord motor for her petrol generator, on which she is dependent for power. At bedtime she reads an environmental manifesto, Blueprint for Survival. Her relationship with Boswens is strange; the volunteer seems alone – but is she? As identified by Macfarlane and others, the eerie acts as a kind of counter-tradition to the romantic Pastoralism of English art; rather than portraying the English countryside as a place of chocolate-box fantasy, it has often zoned in on specific rural localities and tried to convey their haunted essences that are beyond the understanding of urbanite considerations. The film is set in 1973 on an uninhabited island off the Cornish coast. Mary Woodvine plays a wildlife volunteer’s who’s daily observations of a rare flower take her on a metaphysical journey which causes her to question what is real and what is torment. Enys Men is shot in colour of a fierce, rich sort, and looks as if it was made in the year it is set: 1973. It is not exactly a horror film, despite some spasms of disquiet, but an uncanny evocation of how, when left utterly on our own, we spiral inwards into our memories, dreams and fears. Mary Woodvine (who was the well-off second-home owner in Bait) plays a woman living on a remote Cornish island, in a simple cottage whose future condition of moss-covered dereliction she appears to foretell or hallucinate. She is apparently researching the state of some wildflowers at the cliff-edge, every day inspecting their condition and taking their soil temperature, and solemnly recording the unvarying results in pencil in a ledger. FIRST PRESSING ONLY** Fully illustrated booklet featuring new essays by Rob Young, Tara Judah, Jason Wood and William Fowler

When considering the DNA of Enys Men, it’s maybe predictable that many of the films that made it onto the following list are drawn from the 70s – the decade in which the film is grounded. Inevitably, when thinking of this era in Britain, a number of entries on the list are not in fact films at all, but highly innovative, haunting, weird or eerie, productions made for the small screen. Some of them are free-form, others experimental or oblique, yet all are uncompromisingly authored. My filmmaking is an ongoing attempt to make sense of the world and specifically the little bit of it where I happen to live," Jenkin concludes. "I have a continuing obsession with making significant the seemingly insignificant simply by filming it." Yet, Fisher’s own conclusions suggest that to make sense of the world through the eerie is ultimately an impossibility as it "concerns the unknown; when knowledge is achieved, the eerie disappears".