I don’t know that I’d call myself a sucker for cryptic, enigmatic horror films, but if I were put under oath, I couldn’t really deny it either. I think this goes back to my contention that horror is, at the end of the day, not about thrills and chills and gore and jump-out-of-your-seat moments exclusively, like some (many) professional critics seem to think. There’s a whole palette of emotions that could be said to fall under the umbrella of horror, and to me, that’s the important bit: How does it make you feel? And you don’t need to be literal to evoke a feeling. Sometimes, watching something play out that sits just at the edge of comprehension, that may not make logical sense but fills you with unease…that’s the territory of nightmares, and what are horror movies if not our nightmares?
So yeah, I don’t think a film has to make strict “sense” to work. Cryptic, enigmatic, oblique, tone-poem movies can work and work well, but also risk falling apart into incoherence, and that’s unfortunately what I think happens to Enys Men. There’s a lot going for it, but it never really comes together and the result is something that is ultimately more confusing than haunting.
There isn’t really a story so much as there is a series of events and possibly recollections. There’s a woman (credited only as “The Volunteer”) who lives on the remote island of Enys Men, where her sole regular duty appears to be observing a small patch of flowers, noting soil temperature and the condition of the flowers on a daily basis and recording the results in a logbook. The records go back quite some time. She gets up, checks the flowers, checks an abandoned mineshaft by dropping a rock down into it and noting how long it takes to hit bottom, then she goes inside and makes her breakfast. It’s a rocky, wind-swept island, all rocks and moss and the crumbling stone ruins of what appears to have been a small mining village. She lives in the one intact structure on the island, a cottage that’s almost overtaken by the greenery creeping up its sides, as if the island is reclaiming any memory of human occupation. She has running water, but electricity is provided by a generator and rationed out for lights and some broadcast music in the evening. Her only contact with the mainland is a dodgy two-way radio and a supply boat that comes by on a regular basis. There’s a standing stone in her front yard, a monument to some long-ago tragedy.
Otherwise, she’s alone all the time, just her and all of the ghosts of this island.
Not to be too reductive, but it being a story of someone who’s ostensibly going mad from loneliness, told in largely disconnected static moments, results in something that is sort of like
The Lighthouse as told through the lens of
Skinamarink. It looks like something from a bygone era - scratchy, grainy film and a saturated color palette that nonetheless consists mostly of mossy greens, grays and browns, with striking patches of color - the sea, the sky, the woman’s bright blue eyes and brighter red coat, a bright red generator contrasted against a gray stone wall. The sense of isolation is effectively conveyed by the film being very quiet. There’s very little music - the score is mostly ambience with some string and horn swells at especially fraught moments and there’s some diegetic music from her little radio, tinny and faint. There’s almost no dialogue as well (it’s about 10 minutes in before you even hear a voice), so you get these long stretches of silence punctuated by the rattle of a generator, the squawk and buzz of the radio. They aren’t jump scares per se, but the sudden cuts to them do have a startling, unnerving effect. This is probably the most effective thing about the film - the way it alternates long takes with sudden cuts keeps you off-balance. The camera spends as much time off of the woman as on, maybe more, which makes the island itself as much of a character as she is.
The quiet is unnerving, and so is the apparent monotony of the woman’s existence, described through repeated motifs of her daily routine which start to give way to what could be flashbacks or visions, and the way they combine and recombine starts to make everything stranger as the film goes on, in a fashion reminiscent of
I Am A Ghost, another story of a woman all alone in an isolated location. What is at first innocuous becomes, over repetition, sinister, and for the first act at least, there’s a real eeriness to it all. But after the first act it starts to fizzle out, and I think it doesn’t work as well as it could for a couple of reasons. First, the pacing is very, very slow. This isn’t always a problem (in
Skinamarink, for example, it works toward the dreamlike mood and a sense of constant tension), but here it serves to bog down the film in the second act, and any tension built up during the first dissipates. It starts to feel very repetitive, but not in a way where the repetition communicates anything. A film moving slowly isn’t a problem, but it
does need to move. There’s less of a sense of disintegration or escalation than there needs to be as the film goes on. And this ties into the second problem, and that’s that ultimately it’s very difficult to make sense of what’s actually happening. There are what appear to be elements of the supernatural and even some body horror which have some kind of logic to them, but as everything moves away from routine and toward something more fragmentary and irrational, it seems less like the supernatural or a deteriorating mental state and more just a bunch of scenes that sort of relate to each other without committing to a particular through-line. The brief is mostly “person living in relative isolation starts to lose it,” or maybe “is she losing it or is she really being haunted” but the end result is mostly confusing - how much is memory and how much is losing grip on reality isn’t clear, and though there are some moments in isolation that are eerie and unsettling, the whole never really gels like it should and it just sort of ends without pointing toward any particular understanding. Which, again, isn’t necessarily a problem if you’re just going for pure mood, but there’s enough underlying story here that some kind of revelation is expected, and not enough structure for us to really grasp it.
It's a shame, because the editing, cinematography and sound design are all really good - the aesthetics are there and very distinct, which is important for a visual medium. It definitely has a vision, which goes a long way with me, but the execution is messy enough that it feels like a missed opportunity.
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