Bait director Mark Jenkin: ‘Film is only 130 years old. We should still be playing with it’

Things have a habit of getting weird around British director Mark Jenkin. On the way to the premiere of his rural horror Enys Men, the train carrying him and the canisters containing his newly completed film was delayed when the track was struck by lightning. It is the kind of freak event that would not look out of place in one of his darkly experimental mindbenders.

And yet when I meet Jenkin the day after the premiere there is nothing outlandish about him. He has a quietly serious manner, wears a porkpie hat and is twig-thin. “I’m a middle-aged running bore,” he explains. “It’s an addiction. I lost three stone in just a year. I’ll say, ‘I’m going to do a short run,’ and then I’ll come back having done a half marathon . . . How did I turn into this guy?”

Turning into the film-maker he is now was an even longer process: a 20-year marathon to overnight success. Born in 1976, he started as a production assistant on the 1999 BBC documentary series Walking with Dinosaurs before turning his hand from 2002 to making his own films: shorts, documentaries and low-budget features. But it was with Bait in 2019 that he gained wider attention.

Marked by its scratchy black and white photography, shot on an old clockwork 16mm film camera and developed by hand, with all the sound dubbed in later, Bait told the story of a Cornish fisherman struggling to survive against the pressures of gentrification. The film was hailed as vibrantly original, though Jenkin himself was surprised by the reaction.

“When I finished Bait, I thought, ‘This is a pretty standard, run-of-the-mill film.’ And then when it came out and people started writing about it, everybody was talking about how it was batshit crazy in terms of the form, and I became aware of that.”

The film was noted for its elements of class satire as well as psychological horror, and its wry humour helped make its experimental nature more palatable. “I would sit in a cinema and think, ‘I wonder how this is playing.’ And I might have 20 minutes where I’d think, ‘I don’t know where whether this is working or not: I can’t read the room.’ And then there’d be a funny bit and the room would laugh and I’d go: ‘OK, they’re still with it.’”

With Enys Men (Cornish for “stone island”), Jenkin has gone from black and white to colour, but its saturated blues and reds are the hues of vintage Kodak holiday snaps — the film is set in 1973 — and, if anything, the new film is more experimental. The story centres around a woman, credited simply as The Volunteer and played by Mary Woodvine (Jenkin’s creative and life partner). The Volunteer lives alone on an island off the coast of Cornwall and carries out a series of observations and routines every day before recording them in a notebook. There are ghosts, confusion about time, a shipwreck, a mineshaft, a plant, a worsening skin rash and a creeping sense of unease.

To say the film’s meaning is elusive is to put it mildly, but Jenkin is reluctant to give explanations. “I’m just trying to express myself on the screen through this film, and express a feeling and an atmosphere and a mood. If I could do it verbally, I wouldn’t go to the hassle of making a film. I’d probably write it down. It’d be a poem, at best.”

I’m just trying to express myself . . . express a feeling and an atmosphere and a mood. If I could do it verbally, I wouldn’t go to the hassle of making a film

For Jenkin, ambiguity is the core of cinema’s appeal. “I like the potential of cinema to create something that you can’t quite put your finger on. It’s sort of an obnoxious thing to say, because you have to expect an audience to go with something, it might not have narrative closure, or may not even have narrative opening.” Quoting French director Robert Bresson, he argues that he wants to make films people feel, rather than ones they understand. “And if that feeling is frustration or bewilderment, at least it’s a feeling of some kind,” Jenkin says.

Woodvine, whose character carries the film almost single-handedly, has her own answers. “I did do a back-story,” she says. “I don’t think she’s got children. She’s got a partner. I think she’s self-contained. She’s dedicated to nature and the world. And I think that’s her reason for being, that’s why she’s volunteered to be on the island; to observe this plant. She is protecting and observing and bearing witness.”

Thanks in part to his DIY methods, Jenkin’s films are produced on an extremely low budget and the couple, who have collaborated on several films, have developed a disciplined way of working.

“We only do two takes of everything,” Woodvine says. “So there’s one and then there’s one for safety. You have to kind of get it right first time.” This suits Woodvine, whose background is in theatre and quickly made television shows, including EastEnders and Casualty. “Generally, I’m better on the first take anyway. Everything I’ve ever done, you go on the first one. But it’s only two because film is expensive.”

Jenkin’s method was summed up in a manifesto he wrote that had 13 rules, one of which was that one rule must be broken. The result is quite unlike anything you’ve ever seen and though Enys Men can be described as a horror film, he admits it is not a conventional one: “It’s not got any real big jump scares. There are no gags in it,” he says. Jenkin sees himself as similar to maverick director Derek Jarman in the way he plays with form and, more recently, offbeat horror hero Peter Strickland (Berberian Sound Studio, In Fabric). “I share his enthusiasm for mucking about, for want of a better expression.”

It is tempting to see in Enys Men the story of the making of the film, repetition and observation as ghosts loom and the world continues to crumble. And yet, despite the darkness of the vision, Jenkin is nothing if not fundamentally hopeful. “Film is only 130 years old. We should still be playing with it and having fun,” he says. “It doesn’t mean the films are all going to be light-hearted comedies. But you’ve got to feel exhilaration whilst being in this position of being able to make films, to create worlds.”

‘Enys Men’ is in UK cinemas from January 13 with a preview/Q&A tour from January 2. ‘The Cinematic DNA of Enys Men’ season, curated by Mark Jenkin, runs at BFI Southbank and on BFI Player from January 1-31