Enys Men

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On her way home she passes a single Neolithic standing stone that’s around 10-foot high. It sometimes resembles a hooded woman when seen from a distance. The ivy covered dilapidated house where this woman is living is nearby. She will never be named and is credited only as ‘The Volunteer’ and she’s played by Mary Woodvine, the partner of writer/director Mark Jenkin (who also composed and performed a very atmospheric, Eno-esque ambient score using an analogue synthesizer and a tape loop). Some of my choices are linked to Enys Men through form, others by content; but in most cases, hopefully by a bit of both. After all, the greatest films mesh the two in a way that makes it hard to tell where one starts and the other finishes. 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 No sound is recorded on set, with Jenkin relying on post synch for audio. “For me going into the edit with total silence is a brilliant starting point,” he says. It’s both a budgetary and creative choice, with no attempt at realism.

As we get older, we start to connect the landscape with the people who lived in it,” she says. “Give me a 2,000-year-old pot that they found down the road now and I’m fascinated. As a child, I didn’t care. I suppose we’re seeing ourselves where we used to be years ago, and where we are now, realising that we’re all going to become history, too.” 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." Selected items are only available for delivery via the Royal Mail 48® service and other items are available for delivery using this service for a charge. In an article for Far Out, Calum Russell wrote that Enys Men feels "like the spiritual continuation of Bait", Jenkin's previous film, and "more like an innovative art installation than a piece of narrative fiction". [14] Accolades [ edit ] Year In April 2023 Enys Men will be released on BFI Blu-ray/DVD (Dual Format Edition) with contextual extras and on BFI Player where it will join Bait and a selection of Jenkin’s early work. Sales are through Protagonist Pictures.My filmmaking is an ongoing attempt to make sense of the world and specifically the little bit of it where I happen to live," Jenkin concludes. "I have a continuing obsession with making significant the seemingly insignificant simply by filming it." Yet, Fisher’s own conclusions suggest that to make sense of the world through the eerie is ultimately an impossibility as it "concerns the unknown; when knowledge is achieved, the eerie disappears".

In his essay The Weird and the Eerie (2016), the academic Mark Fisher defined eeriness as "constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of presence". That is, for Fisher, the eerie "occurs either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or if there is nothing present when there should be something". Enys Men falls into the former camp, where the island should be absence made manifest, but instead provides spectres of class trauma breaking the volunteer's solitude. The local industry and its demise is the most unsettled ghost of the film. The retro ‘70s look and feel of Enys Men features popping reds and yellows, which Jenkin describes as ‘disturbing colours.’ 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.The critically acclaimed mind-bending folk horror, Enys Men is set for Dual Format Edition (Blu-ray/DVD) and the simultaneous exclusive streaming release on BFI Player from May. 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.