Enys Men
Written and Directed by Mark Jenkin
Starring Mary Woodvine, Edward Rowe, Flo Crowe
MPAA Rating - Unrated
Runtime: 91 minutes
In theaters now

by Billy Russell, Staff Writer

You know me. I tend to go easy on movies who have the audacity to eschew traditional narrative, particularly in an era of highly-regimented formula adherence. More and more I admire movies who are willing to take a chance and get us from point A to point C without following a roadmap that leads us, predictably, through point B. I like to take the scenic route. I like to be challenged. I like to see something that looks and feels organically-created by an artist, rather than a committee at a market research lab.

Enys Men is nothing if not ambitious on that front. “Story” here is a loose term. The main character, known only as the volunteer (played by Mary Woodvine) is assigned a task in which she monitors a certain routine, day after day, on a lonely island. She wakes up, walks around in her little red jacket, checks on some flowers, throws a rock into a well and listens for a splash, heads home, logs the day, starts up a generator, makes herself some tea and food, then goes to bed. The next day, she repeats. Each day, in the final column of her log, she writes “no change”, until, one day, she begins to notice a strange growth on the flowers.

I don’t like to give away too much of any movie that I’m reviewing. I recap the thinnest of plots and allow the viewer to soak in its many surprises that it has in store. I’ll be damned if I could give away too much of this movie even if I tried. What I’ve explained above, the incredibly in-depth humdrum simulator of walking around a lonely island, looking at flowers, dropping stones and drinking tea, makes up about 80% of Enys Men. The other 20% is avant-garde, out-of-chronological-order experiment in would-be horror.

Like Skinamarink, another relatively plotless love-it-or-hate it entry into experimental horror, it always seems to be building up to something that never, ever happens. There are moments where things appear to be ramping up, some sort of tension is being crafted, but nothing ever comes of it. In a way, I feel like Enys Men is an anti-movie. It has no interest in telling a story–which is fine, I think “story” is a weak excuse to hold movies to some absurd narrative standard. It also, unfortunately, has no interest in being entertaining, either.

There are ghosts that the volunteer occasionally confronts. Maybe they’re ghosts? Just like the lichens she observes growing on the flowers, and then on herself. Maybe it’s some sort of invasive fungus? Maybe not, though. Nothing ever amounts to anything, and the rug is constantly being pulled out from under us. At one moment, the volunteer hears a noise in the middle of the night and she calls out, “Who’s there?” In another moment, the volunteer is observing herself, as a woman who lived on the island hundreds of years ago, doing the same and calling out “Who’s there?” to herself. The music indicates that we should be afraid, and it echoes and booms as a familiar scare chord, but it’s simply baffling. It’s a meaningless moment in a film that seems smugly satisfied with being an enigma for the fun of it. It’s like a puzzle, and just as you think you understand how certain pieces fit together, another series of pieces from an unrelated puzzle are dumped onto you, and you’re being convinced that these should all fit together somehow… but they just don’t, and they will.

“Enys men” means “stone island” in Cornish, which refers to setting of the film itself, and not, as it turns out, to my surprise, the maybe/maybe not ghosts of the miners who inhabit the underground of the island. At one point, one of these ghostly apparitions helps itself into the volunteer’s living quarters and takes a shit. The volunteer doesn’t seem to be bothered by this, nowhere near as bothered as I was. How did the ghost, or whatever he is, feel the need to release his bowels? Did he die from eating too many bad cornish pasties and is now doomed to an afterlife of diarrhea, roaming the many moors of the island with an upset, spectral stomach?

Enys Men was shot on 16mm and looks fantastic. While watching, I wondered if it had been shot digitally and then made to appear as film in post production, but I learn that the film was indeed shot on the physical medium. It looks all the better for it. The colors are rich and vibrant. There are some well-shot and well-sequenced moments that evoke the work of Andrei Tarkovsky, with a grittiness you’d see in a movie directed by Lucio Fulci, and these moments are in search of a better movie to be in, one that doesn’t have such disdain for its viewing audience.

Part of the fun of seeing a movie with an audience in the theater, particularly a horror movie, is having that communal experience, where you’re all sharing in the delight of being manipulated by a work of art. You jump at the scares, you laugh at the gags, and you feel alive with it. The audience I saw Enys Men with was completely, eerily silent, save for one moment when the volunteer once again writes “no change” in her neverending log, and someone let out a long, sharp, exasperated sigh. I felt that sigh in my bones.