Shooting his latest film Enys Men on 16mm color filmstock and unfolding its story in non-linear fashion – between the past, present and the future, the real and the imagined – director Mark Jenkin has created an abstract, mind-bending, cinematic experience unlike most others you are likely to encounter.
As the follow up to his BAFTA-winning, B&W breakthrough feature, Bait (2019), the action remains in Cornwall, but Enys Men is a completely different kettle of fish altogether. Whereas Bait portrayed the displacement of locals and livelihoods through the contemporary gentrification of a small Cornish community, Enys Men is set in 1973 on a remote island just off the coast, and offers surreal, enigmatic and unsettling meditations about the environment, life, love, loneliness and death.
Sensorial sound design, plus spartan dialogue – created by Jenkin himself, and added entirely in post-production, as they were with Bait – evoke a foreboding atmosphere, as a woman known only as ‘The Volunteer’ (Mary Woodvine), leads a solitary existence.
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