Will it scare you? I doubt it. If this is a folk horror then it’s an experimental, existential and enigmatic folk horror. It will likely unsettle you along the way though. Enys Men is a mind-bending Cornish folk horror set in 1973 that unfolds on an uninhabited island off the Cornish coast.

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. You can find out more about how Falmouth University supports independent cinema through its Sound/ Image CinemaLab here. Pippa Considine 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 1970s saw a wealth of films deal with the decidedly strange atmospheres of English landscapes in a similar fashion – films such as David Gladwell's Requiem for a Village (1976), Peter Hall's Akenfield (1974), both set in Suffolk, and Philip Trevelyan's Sussex-centred documentary The Moon and the Sledgehammer (1971). All of these mix documentary aesthetics and a desire to capture life in the countryside with stranger elements, whether it be people rising from their graves, as in Gladwell's film, or overlapping time periods, as in Hall's.Jenkin has a second preoccupation alongside his analogue sensibility: the landscape and culture of his native Cornwall. While Bait was a deeply modern tale of Cornish gentrification told with old technology, Enys Men reflects that same local interest but with stronger cohesion between the old filmic form and its period setting. Latif, Leila (20 May 2022). " 'Enys Men' Review: An Artfully Constructed Folk Horror Film About Never-Ending Grief". IndieWire. Here, Jenkin provides us with an extensive list of folk horror, television oddities, eerie children's movies and experimental shorts.

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. Mark Jenkin is based in a studio in Newlyn, West Cornwall where he writes, edits and scores his films himself. His debut feature Bait was released in the UK by BFI Distribution, becoming an arthouse hit, eventually screening at hundreds of cinemas and taking over half a million at the UK box office. Mark Jenkin and his producers, Linn Waite and Kate Byers, won the BAFTA for outstanding debut by a writer, producer or director.

Side guide

The pace here is slow and dialogue is minimal – with much of it coming via her limited interactions on a battered VHF metal maritime radio. No one is named. In addition to the Volunteer and the Girl; there’s the Boatman; the Preacher and others. Enys Men is far from plot heavy and I don’t even know how much of it I properly understood. Despite this, never for a moment was I remotely bored. Instead, I found myself consistently fascinated. a b Kiang, Jessica (27 May 2022). " 'Enys Men' Review: A Gorgeously Grainy Folk Horror Steeped in Style but Starved of Story". Variety. Lemercier, Fabien (27 April 2022). "Scents of Europe and discoveries at the Cannes Directors' Fortnight". cineuropa.org . Retrieved 8 October 2023.

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? Trewhela, Lee (1 December 2022). "Enys Men: Cornwall director Mark 'Bait' Jenkin's new film gets early screenings in the South West". Cornwall Live . Retrieved 15 January 2023. BBC Culture spoke to Jenkin about his new film and the preoccupations of his work. "I was a rural kid," he suggests when asked of his influences, "and I suppose I always seemed to be attracted to the dark side of things, a desire to be a bit scared, but to also look at the flip side of the idyll. Part of that is a reaction against the way that Cornwall is idealised and romanticised." Enys Men is a different beast to Bait: more abstract, filmed in highly saturated colour and set in a landscape of eerie coastal moorland in the spring of 1973. The film’s star, other than Boswens, is an unnamed wildlife volunteer played by Mary Woodvine, Jenkin’s real-life partner and a familiar face in his other films. Every day, the volunteer stops to drop a stone into the murky depths of an abandoned tin mine (which I also visit en route to meet Jenkin, nearly falling off its gale-blasted foundations), then notes down her observations of a rare, curious flower growing nearby. The Duchy of Cornwall (1938, 15 mins): a rapid survey of early Cornish history looks at the county's language, landscape and industriesFor Enys Men, all rushes were processed by Kodak Film lab at Pinewood and then scanned by Digital Orchard on its Scanity 4k HDR.