The Reel Review
A lone wildlife volunteer keeping watch over a clump of flowers on an uninhabited island starts experiencing a blurring of the lines between reality and imagination, in this atmospheric, experimental horror set in 1973 off England’s Cornish coast.
Enys Men, or “stone island” in Cornish, is one of those movies that is heavy on jarring visual imagery and exceptionally light on dialogue – or even coherent storytelling. Its star, Mary Woodvine, only says a handful of words throughout the film. Each day her routine consists of monitoring the flowers, taking the ground temperature near them, tossing a rock into a nearby mine shaft, making the note “no change” in her ledger, and firing up the generator. Every day, the same, monotonous thing – until aberrations, and new characters, suddenly start to appear. Lichen starts growing on the flowers – and her. Is she imagining it? Or is all of this real?
With most of his film shot in grainy 16mm to give it a groovy, vintage vibe, writer/director Mark Jenkin apparently intended for Enys Men to be like a Rorschach test – with each viewer taking away something different based on individual personal life experiences. Even so, while a few will embrace that, the vast majority of viewers will find Enys Men tedious and pointless performance art – a pretentious collage of images and symbolism, intended to be a treatise on boredom that ironically is itself boring.
REEL FACTS
• Writer/director Mark Jenkin says the classic 1973 drama/thriller Don’t Look Now starring Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie was the inspiration for his film.
• Mary Woodvine’s father, Shakespearean actor John Woodvine, plays the role of The Preacher in Enys Men.
• Enys Men was filmed among the former tin mines at the Cornish Mining World Heritage Site in West Penwith, England.
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