Review: An ominous landscape haunts a rocky Cornish outpost in celluloid oddity ‘Enys Men’

Nothing and everything is alive in British filmmaker Mark Jenkin’s sophomore feature, “Enys Men,” an art horror curio built around the ghostly allure of a craggy island landscape, in this case an uninhabited rock off the coast of the director’s beloved, clawlike peninsula of Cornwall. Nature nurtured into an eerie consciousness by a celluloid craftsman, it feels like a throwback to “Wicker Man”-era folk-tinged freakouts — confounding enough to not be everyone’s cup of tea, but for those ready for a pot of its brew, plenty transporting and tingling.

Across his body of work (mostly black-and-white experimental shorts), Jenkin’s specialty has been a kind of hand-processed cinema calling up the grain, aural scratch and atmosphere of something discovered in a disused attic, of possibly mysterious origins. (The lost-in-time aura of Canadian Guy Maddin’s oeuvre is a transatlantic cousin.) He’s best known for his BAFTA-awarded 2019 feature “Bait,” a masterful, odd, brusquely stylish drama about economic and family tensions in a present-day Cornish fishing village, old ways deployed to dramatize a modern reality.

“Enys Men” is his quieter but no less evocative follow-up, shot in chunky 16mm color, set in a 1973 it could have been made in, and closer in mood to the psychological, location-thick flow of a Nicolas Roeg dream by way of Roberto Rossellini. Our entry point is the daily ritual of a wildlife volunteer (“Bait” actor Mary Woodvine), whose springtime stint on this windswept island — once a tin-mining site where a historic tragedy occurred — is to study a group of rare flowers growing at a granite cliff overlooking a crashing shore. Back at the crumbling, moss-covered, generator-powered cottage where she hangs her cherry-red windbreaker, she records her observations, which amounts to rows and rows of the words “No change.”

But in this scenario, change feels relative when it’s unclear if our never-named protagonist is alone or not, and what or who is possibly the subject of transformation. There’s the occasional sighting of an adolescent girl (Flo Crowe), who might be a figment of the volunteer’s imagination, and later the appearance of a burly supply-boat captain (Edward Rowe, also from “Bait”) who feels descended from the hard men who’ve long worked an unforgiving geography. And with Jenkin’s arsenal of atmospheric insert shots capturing the island’s topography like an alert companion, it’s as if no heather-studded expanse or field of quivering brush or close-up of rocky terrain was beyond consideration as proof of a simmering presence.

Most arresting and ominous, however, is the ancient stone monolith that from certain faraway angles looks like the carved figure of a nun, and that might just be more than a landscape fixture visible from the volunteer’s door. At times you’d swear that shots of the cottage are the stone’s POV, just one of the ways Jenkin — who is his own cinematographer and editor — keeps the curious moviegoer rewarded by a foreboding tone when grasping for a story seems insufficient.

“Enys Men” isn’t a movie one describes with “then this happened,” because more often than not it feels like you’ve stumbled into a state of curling unsettledness, rendering a portrait of uneasy coexistence between a woman and her surroundings, history and the now, death and rebirth. (Even between low-budget horror of past and present.) When we encounter sudden apparitions of long-ago maidens or dead miners, or the sprouting of flowers in an unusual place, these aren’t so much scare shocks as deliberate chills in the weather — an island revealing its sacred and pagan secrets like a mad organist.

Watching “Enys Men” unfold, I kept thinking of the classic 1963 version of “The Haunting,” and the well-seeded notion from that ghost story’s elliptical terror that a house could want something from a visitor. Jenkin achieves the same effect here with his pastoral, oblique Cornish oddity, corralling his sublime, boxy compositions, sensorial editing and carefully hushed sound design into what can only be called a rusted, rustic nightmare.