Enys Men

Joe Gray

The Miner

There is something increasingly funny about the Volunteer repeatedly writing **“NO CHANGE”** in her notebook, because *Enys Men* is a film in which almost nothing will agree to stay where it has been put. A woman in a red coat observes seven flowers on a remote Cornish island. She checks them, makes tea, drops a stone down a mine shaft, struggles with the generator and does it all again. Initially these repetitions establish routine. Then Mark Jenkin starts altering the things around them. People appear who may belong to different times. A scar acquires lichen. Miners emerge from below ground. A standing stone begins to feel less like scenery than something patiently keeping watch. The temptation is to solve all this, but *Enys Men* becomes more interesting if the island is allowed to remain slightly insoluble. Its people may be ghosts, memories, fragments of the Volunteer herself or simply different moments in the same place occupying the screen at once. What connects them is the land. That is where the film's folk horror really lives. There is no secret village committee organising a sacrifice. The older force is Cornwall itself: stone, sea, mines, wrecks, religion, labour and death accumulating until human time starts looking rather temporary. The Volunteer is studying the flowers, yet gradually the unsettling possibility emerges that she is simply another organism being absorbed into the same landscape. Jenkin's grainy 16mm images and deliberately fractured sound matter because they make that instability physical. The film doesn't merely tell us that time is slipping. It looks and sounds as though the film itself has been damaged by whatever is happening on the island. Repetition stops reassuring us because tiny differences become suspicious. It is also demanding. There is very little conventional narrative propulsion, and anyone waiting for the lichen to reveal its evil masterplan is going to have a long afternoon. Even for us, admiration for the film's craft comes rather more easily than surrendering completely to its spell. But *Enys Men* rewards being worried at. It is strange, beautiful and stubbornly uninterested in explaining itself, a folk-horror film in which the landscape does not contain the history. The landscape **is** the history. --- Reviewed by FolknHell, the folk horror film podcast folknhell com Hear the full FolknHell podcast discussion of Enys Men: folknhell com/enys-men-review Along with our other reviews, transcripts and episodes at: folknhell com