In the Director’s Statement in the Press Packet for his new film, Enys Men (2022), Mark Jenkin writes that the film emerged from “images” he had “in my head.” These images arise from the land and the history of Cornwall – from the moors, sea, standing stones, mines and miners, bal maidens (female mine workers), and the men who made their living on the sea. The film didn’t just emerge from these images, however; the film is these images. To describe Enys Men is not to describe a story or a plot – because story and plot demand linear time and conventional causality. Enys Men creates a world structured very differently. And it is, quite simply, one of the most thought-provoking, beautiful, and engrossing films I’ve watched in a long time – and certainly one of the best films of 2022.
Enys Men centers on The Volunteer, played brilliantly by Mary Woodvine, who lives on an uninhabited island off the coast of Cornwall for the purpose of documenting seven rare flowers growing on the rocky cliffside of the island. The film traces her movement from her house, past a standing stone, over moors to the cliff edge and back each day. As she comes back, she passes an old mine and drops a rock down a mine shaft. (Having watched the film very carefully twice, I have to confess that I’m not sure why she does this: but it is a ritual with clear meaning to her.) She then arrives back at her house and records the status of the flowers in her journal. From the journal, we learn the date. We are near the end of April in 1973, and for days – months – there has been “No change” with the flowers. But to the extent that there is indeed a ‘story’ driving this film – story as famously described by E. M. Forster as “a narrative of events arranged in their time sequence” – it is a story in large part about the flowers.[i] Because on April 30, they do change. And on May 1, they change again.
Something else happens on May 1, 1973, too, although it is less anchored in that “narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence” that defines conventional “story.” It is less driven, in other words, by story’s underlying, structuring linear time. This other thing that happens on May 1, 1973, is something that has happened before – on May 1, 1897. And it is with this simultaneity of two similar (possibly identical) events – separated by almost a century and yet occurring seemingly at the same time – that the sense of time animating Enys Men becomes clear.
Jenkin notes in his Director’s Statement that Enys Men is, among other things, about “block universe theory.” The meaning of “block universe theory,” also known as eternalism, is to some degree inherent in its name. Instead of events proceeding in a linear way – one event succeeded by another and thus banished, after it happens, to the past – everything equally exists. In other words, the universe is not constituted by a string of events that happen one after the other but is constituted, at the same time, by everything that has happened, is happening, and (in some views) will happen. That which exists in the past and the present (and in some views, the future) is equally real. The universe is a block: time is static, not dynamic. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it, “objects from the past and future exist.” To put it another way, “According to the eternalist, temporal location does not affect ontology.”[ii] Whether one is temporally located in the past or in the present, one is equally “real.” Your past and present incarnations equally exist.
Check out the trailer for Enys Men:
Enys Men is driven by this philosophy of interwoven time and space. What that means is that The Volunteer, who exists in 1973, is surrounded by people and events from across time that have shared her space, including a younger iteration of herself. The locations of the film – house, standing stone, cliff, quay, mine, church – are inhabited by people from multiple temporal locations. The Volunteer sees some of them in her house – a preacher, a young girl (herself), a boatman, and a miner. She watches a miner in her bathroom, coughing, leaving the house for work in a mine that has long been abandoned. She sees miners, seamen, bal women, children celebrating May Day – all equally present to her even though their temporal locations diverge.
Jenkin has said that the most obvious difference between his last film, Bait (2019), and Enys Men is that the latter is in color. And color is enormously important to this film. At the center of the film’s color palette are the flowers. Their petals are white, with a yellow stigma and red stamens; these colors ripple through the mise en scène of the film. The white of the petals connect to the white dresses of the children and the may blossoms they carry. The red of the stamens connect with The Volunteer’s red coat – and they literally lean toward her, amplifying a connection that remains obscure (why are the flowers drawn to her?); certainly, their multiplicity suggests hers, as she exists in several different temporal locations in the film. The yellow of the stigma connects to a yellow seaman’s slicker, one The Volunteer finds crumpled on the rocks. As the film moves, lichen grows on the flowers – and it corresponds to lichen that grows on The Volunteer’s abdominal scar.
The Volunteer and the flowers are connected somehow; the film never explains how, but if things exist equally across time, Enys Men also suggests their relatively equal ontological status. The Volunteer’s existence is woven with constructed objects and vegetation, with her built and natural environment. Jenkin shows this brilliantly with his editing, which sews together shots of people from different temporal locations with a radio, the flowers, a mine cart, the standing stone. Jenkin has claimed that the idea for his film “was inclined toward Folk Horror” – starting one layer deeper than the more familiar “already uncovered brutal pagan past” with “only one place left to go: further underground, far into the earth, through the living rock itself.” What lies underground – this “living rock” has powerfully determined Cornwall’s history, as has the sea off its long coastlines. Jenkin draws rock and sea into his story, as objects that center the “myths” and “ritual” of folk horror but also as living actors in the region’s past.
If Mark Jenkin concertedly set out to make a “Cornish folk horror,” where exactly is the horror in this breathtakingly beautiful film? I would say that the horror emerges from the film’s brilliant representation of time – its depiction of the way that time doesn’t really move, that past, present, and future exist, equally, in the same place. This is what Jenkin means, I think, when he that the “horror” of Enys Men would be “in the form.” What this means is that Enys Men is infused with the dread of events unfolding both in the future and in the past and present. The Volunteer, walking her usual route across the island to the cliff and back, glimpses past and present harms and tragedies as well as those that loom in the future.
In another folk horror narrative, Alan Garner’s 1967 novel The Owl Service (adapted for television in 1969-70), one of the characters responds to another, who has asked whether the place is haunted: “Not haunted. . . . More like – still happening?”[iii] The sense of time Jenkin creates in Enys Men means that events are still, continually, happening. Miners cough and trudge down the mine; seamen drown. The lives that have been, the lives that are, and the lives that will be, continue in their place.
Enys Men will be released in the UK and Ireland on January 13, 2023. It has a limited theatrical release in the US on March 31, 2023 – and is available on streaming platforms as of Tuesday April 18, 2023.
Notes:
[i] E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (Harcourt, 1927), p. 27.
[ii] Nina Emery, Ned Markosian, and Meghan Sullivan, “Time“, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).
[iii] Alan Garner, The Owl Service (1967; HarperCollins, 2017), p. 63.
