With his breakthrough feature, Bait, in 2019, Cornish film-maker Mark Jenkin showed himself a bold experimentalist, the creator of a daringly strange expressionist cinema. It was a minimalist piece of work in black and white with the aesthetic of a silent film or even a home movie – shot on 16mm and developed by hand.
Now he has refined and developed this unique, stripped-down style for an eerie prose-poem of a movie about loneliness: Enys Men – the last word is pronounced “mane”, and in Cornish means “stone island”. It has the same almost primitive texture: the film itself feels like a hard, wizened, weatherbeaten object, like those seen on screen. Long stretches will go past entirely wordlessly, with ambient sea-spray sound and closeups on stones or cups, or the dial of the old two-way radio with which contact is maintained with the outside world. But it is far from restful. The mood is strange, always picking up on some disturbance in the ether, with sudden, deafening stabs of sound.
