Enys Men review — spooky art film is all show and no tell

Enys Men is the kind of spooky, mysterious art film where every detail is significant but you’re left wondering if it means anything at all. A deliberately static tone poem, it depicts a tiny world where time loops round and round.

Ghostly inhabitants of an island pass each other like ships off the coast, sometimes acknowledging one another and sometimes not. And sometimes the unnamed protagonist (Mary Woodvine), described as “the volunteer” in the credits, even sees herself, in the future and deep in the past. Look closely and it seems as if a tall standing stone moves around the island like the volunteer herself, changing position and size. The hills are alive here, and yes, there’s the sound of music, mostly eerie folky choirs singing in Cornish, interspersed with a carefully arranged sound design full of drones and thuds.

This is writer-director Mark Jenkin’s follow-up to his 2019 monochrome hit Bait. Like that previous film, Enys Men is shot on a roughed-up, boxy 16mm film stock that goes with the 1970s timeframe and fits the folk-horror vibe too. The volunteer, possibly going mad in her semi-isolation, is beset by visions of long-dead tin miners, drowned lovers and seven maidens in 19th-century gowns, one for every petal of the weird white flowers she comes to study daily. Those blossoms look like hesperantha to me, but zhuzhed up with extra scarlet stamens and, later, exceedingly fast-growing lichen that latches on to both the flowers and the volunteer herself. Who knew botany could be so creepy?

With only about six lines of dialogue spoken throughout, not counting the singing and radio mumbles, Enys Men is all show and no tell, and some viewers might find that infuriating. It’s better viewed as an art installation playing around with old-school techniques such as jump cuts and reversed footage, intentionally repetitious until it becomes weirdly hypnotic.

★★★★☆

In cinemas in the UK from January 13; available to stream in the US now