Time on an Island

We seem to be going through a period in which many of the films on release, certainly the significant ones, seem to be suffering from elephantiasis of the run-time: the new Avatar is three and a quarter hours long, Babylon likewise cracks 180 minutes, critical darlings Tar and The Fabelmans are two and a half hours, and even the Whitney Houston biopic (a film about the life of a pop star), is longer than 2001: A Space Odyssey (a philosophical exploration of the nature of human intelligence and the ultimate destiny of the species. Without any singing in it).

It’s a relief to come across something a bit more digestible, length-wise at least, such as Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men. This is also a film with a very easy-to-grasp title, provided you speak Cornish (‘stone island’ is the answer to the question you may well be framing in your mind at this point). Most of the rest of the film is, to be fair, considerably less straightforward.

Jenkin, a long-time TV and film professional, caused a bit of a stir with his previous film, Bait, a striking tale of non-singing Cornish fishermen, and this film should only cement his reputation as British cinema’s leading chronicler of life in the south-west, although quite what Enys Men is saying about the region is not always apparent.

Mary Woodvine plays a woman, credited only as ‘the volunteer’, who is living on the small island of the title, somewhere off the coast of Cornwall. It is the late Spring or early Summer of 1973. She appears to be there to conduct some sort of botanical survey: every day, she leaves her small cottage, makes her way across the island to where a small clump of flowers is growing, makes some observations about them, and then returns home where she writes up her notes, normally detouring to drop a stone down a disused mineshaft. She is alone; contact with the outside world is by radio – this is how she arranges fresh supplies of food and petrol.

But is she quite alone? The whole question of what is real and what is happening solely in her mind is an important one, considering the audience has no way of being certain. A young woman occasionally seems to be in and around the cottage. Other figures – a preacher, a boatman, women in traditional clothing, miners – also appear from time to time on the island. There is a further rather peculiar and rather baleful presence: a distinctive rock formation, which is (usually) not far from the cottage. However, given the ongoing disintegration of the fabric of space and time which seems to be in progress, this is not always a given.

There are various signs that past and future are piling up on top of one another, and that the distinction between the island and herself is slowly becoming confused. Does the landscape itself have a strange sentience of its own, operating through the rock?

Naturally, the film is much stronger on questions than answers. Its effectiveness stems from the success it has in evoking the  same kind of atmosphere as some of the weirder short films, TV shows and public information broadcasts of the decade in which it is set – creepy and unsettling little things I barely remember from my own young childhood. (It’s helped by the fact it is filmed in 16mm, the same format so many of those things used.)

Other than a brief sequence of self-harm, there is no violence and relatively little blood in the movie, but it still achieves a profound sense of disquiet and inescapable wrongness, especially as it continues. The film has its own rhythm and structure, built around the pattern of the protagonist’s days, and it is the small intrusions into and deviations from this that tell the story. The repetition produces an almost mesmeric effect as the days go by (or is it just the same day, endlessly repeating?).

On the other hand, I can imagine many people more used to conventional horror films being profoundly unimpressed by a film with very little dialogue, the story of which the audience really has to figure out for themselves. Perhaps we are in the realm of the post-horror or the horror-adjacent here – though, perhaps inevitably, suggestions that Enys Men is really a new folk horror classic are already in circulation. (To be fair, the fact that the film appears to be set almost exactly at the same time as The Wicker Man is surely not a coincidence, and suggests Jenkin himself was thinking along these lines.)

You can’t really discuss a film like this without considering the contribution of the main performer, and Mary Woodvine gives a remarkable performance – obviously, there’s a tricky balance to be found between overplaying her reactions to what’s going on around her (which might topple the film into camp) and just being too deadpan (which would probably result in a baffling art piece). She gets it just about right and the film is, for the most part, engrossingly enigmatic, with moments of genuine shock. Most of the other cast are in non-speaking roles – though I feel obliged to mention the appearance of Woodvine’s father John in a small part, 93 years old and clearly still going strong (Woodvine was a familiar face on British TV in the 1970s and 80s, but his biggest movie role was probably playing the doctor in An American Werewolf in London).

I see that Enys Men is being billed in some places as an ‘experimental horror film’, which to be honest makes me suspect some caution on the part of the people publicising it – ‘experimental’ being a kind of shorthand for ‘don’t complain to us if it’s not what you were expecting and you don’t like it’. I suppose in the end this is an accurate description – it’s a movie with the odd definitely scary moment, but which has only one character, is fairly repetitive, and the role of the monster is played by a pile of rocks – and I can imagine a lot of people not really connecting with it. However, there is craft and imagination here, and in its own way it is a quietly rather rewarding film.