A central picture in Mark Jenkin’s weathered, rough-hewn, rocky folks horror “Enys Males” is of a weathered, rough-hewn rock. A menhir that appears prefer it’s been orphaned from Stonehenge stands perched on a blustery hillside on the eponymous isle (pronounced Ennis Foremost, the Cornish for “Stone Island”). And simply as many such historic monoliths stay considerably inexplicable, this placing cinematic anomaly seems as if excavated from the annals of filmmaking historical past, with the viewer taking part in the befuddled archaeologist confronted with an uncanny artefact from a misplaced civilization. Disgrace that generally, such discoveries become extra spectacular for a way they give the impression of being than what they imply.
Shot by Jenkin himself, who additionally writes, edits and scores, the hand-processed, richly saturated “Enys Males” is heat to the attention and furious with attractive 16mm grain, glorying in a scratchy, imprecisely post-synced soundtrack. It follows — or trundles after, in ever-decreasing circles — a lady recognized solely as The Volunteer (Mary Woodvine), who in the spring of 1973 is seemingly the only real inhabitant of the island, for those who don’t rely all of the apparitions.
She is concerned in an obscure botanical analysis program that entails tramping from her fairly cottage throughout the island, previous a wreck and a properly, to measure the soil temperature on the similar cliffside spot, then tramping again to report her findings. “No change,” she pencils in, day after day after day, earlier than making a cup of tea, checking the fuel ranges on the sputtering generator, taking a shower and going to mattress. Often, a radio crackles. Generally she reads a ebook, although she by no means appears to get very far by means of it.
The girl’s solitary day by day rituals are very a lot the purpose right here, as they’re repeated with solely probably the most minor of alterations: the scale of the stone she throws down the properly that day, say, or the angle of the shot of it leaving her hand. Nonetheless, by the fifth or sixth “no change” it’s exhausting to cease impatience setting in, particularly because the attentive viewer will have already got sussed that there’s one thing squirrely occurring with the movie’s inside calendar. A radio report refers to a memorial to the victims of a sea tragedy as having been erected in Could 1973, although, because the Volunteer writes out painstakingly again and again, that is solely late April. Finally different glitches seem, like when she finds a reduce flower and brings it dwelling, solely to be the one who cuts it just a few days later. Or when she mounts on her mantel a bit of dripping flotsam salvaged from a ship wreck that both has not but occurred, or occurred a pair of centuries prior. The country home she lives in appears overlaid with a reminiscence of its personal future dereliction. Blood drips from a wound she hasn’t but sustained.
And there are extra clearly eerie, supernatural trappings too, many of them barely drained tropes given the current resurgence of folks horror as a style. There are visions of a creepy priest concerned in some arcane ritual, in addition to a refrain of younger women dressed in virgin-sacrifice white. And mimicking the sudden look of some mossy tendrils in the petals of the flowers she is finding out, a line of lichen grows throughout the standing stone, in the same sample to the vaguely gangrenous, fibrous rash that begins to unfold throughout the Volunteer’s stomach. Finally, the movie takes on the character of a waking nightmare, although it should be stated, not one that’s ever truly very scary.
Essentially the most exceptional factor about Jenkin’s glorious, BAFTA-winning 2019 breakout “Bait” was how a lot that movie’s equally experimental — although black-and-white — imagery complemented the story it advised. A story of gentrification, of conventional life and professions being pushed out by newer, much less artisanal applied sciences, its aesthetic itself felt like an identical celebration of old-school filmmaking in an age of digital sterility. Right here, the defiantly creaky early-cinema strategies are extraordinarily cool to have a look at (and take heed to, given Jenkin’s brooding, evocative soundscapes), however really feel thematically misplaced at sea.
There are, of course, references to bygone British cult classics like “The Wicker Man” and “The Blood on Devil’s Claw.” There’s a particular “Don’t Look Now” homage in the eye-popping brilliant pink of the Volunteer’s raincoat. There’s even a bit of Kubrickian “You have got all the time been the caretaker” vibe to some of the later twists, whereas Robert Eggers’ “The Lighthouse” supplies a newer touchpoint for the people-going-crazy-with-isolation-on-an-island subgenre.
None of these titles are remotely unhealthy firm to be in, however it’s exhausting to not be dissatisfied that the place “Bait” referred so cleverly to points outdoors the engulfing textures of its fascinating body, right here Jenkin solely ever actually refers to different films. Visually and sonically, “Enys Males” is completely intoxicating, however an absence of any nourishing interaction between type and content material makes it really feel like getting drunk on an empty abdomen, alone on an island the place every part occurs on the similar time, and nothing actually occurs in any respect.
