Island of lost souls: Mark Jenkin on Enys Men

• Enys Men is in UK cinemas from 13 January.

For one long term in junior school, Mark Jenkin’s class worked their way laboriously through James Vance Marshall’s 1959 novel Walkabout. Then, for an end-of-term treat, their teacher wheeled in a giant telly and they watched Nicolas Roeg’s fractured and hallucinatory 1971 adaptation of the book.

“It was the beginning of everything,” Jenkin tells me.

The violence of the edit, slamming image against image. Time chopped up, reordered, reversed. Sex and death and primal images. Narrative exploded. The magic of montage, film sculpted in the splices on the editing deck. “Film has to be formally interesting,” Jenkin says. “I love films that foreground the fact that you are watching film.”

Walkabout imprinted itself on Jenkin’s brain. It led to his early work as an editor in TV and music video, then a return to his native Cornwall and a long period of formal experimentation with shorts and documentaries, usually shot on celluloid and hand-developed at home through some strange Heath Robinson-type contraptions. This was the technique he used for his breakout first feature Bait (2019), a weird artefact of a film that seemed to bob up to the surface from the primordial deep, images looming out of beat-up celluloid.

Bait proved a major success, a crossover from margin to mainstream. Jenkin remains unaffectedly delighted by this turn of events.

Enys Men, his second feature, is released in January. For the occasion, Jenkin has programmed a season of films for the BFI, called ‘The Cinematic DNA of Enys Men’. First on his list, of course, was Walkabout.

The title of the season is the perfect metaphor for locating his extraordinary new film. It is not just a set of direct influences, but a dive into the very source code, the building blocks and film grammars that underlie his distinct vision.

Enys Men (Cornish for ‘stone island’) is shot in vibrant colour on 16mm, developed this time in a lab but heavily manipulated for the same grungy surface in his home editing studio. It tells the enigmatic, almost entirely wordless story of The Volunteer (played by Mary Woodvine), left alone on an island off the shores of Cornwall to monitor a particularly rare flower. She has to eke out provisions between visits of the supply boat, an isolation that echoes the Covid restrictions in force when the film was shot.

The exact rhythm of The Volunteer’s days are first established, then sliced and diced in a way that foregrounds the brute power of the edit to contract or dilate time. The viewer is trained into the strict structure of her day. Yet the rigour of her routine, documented in her notebook of observations, soon begins to unravel.

The orderly time of experiment collapses and multiple layers of the island’s traumatic history start to leak into the present. Without giving too much away, this may involve the spectral return of Cornish tin miners, drowned sailors, trouble with lichen, dancing maidens and some shenanigans involving an ancient standing stone – all accompanied by an astounding electronic soundtrack, largely composed by Jenkin himself.

The film is set very precisely in 1973, exactly 50 years before its release, and it has the look and feel of a film from that era, like a rarity lost and recovered from the archive. I want to ask Jenkin about the influences that might have been coded into the film. The Volunteer’s red coat is from Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, obviously – a key 1973 film. That was also the year of The Wicker Man and The Exorcist. The theme of different times collapsing and leaking into each other is central to several 1970s classics, from John Mackenzie’s adaptation of Alan Garner’s Red Shift (1978) to the Nigel Kneale-scripted The Stone Tape (1972) and Alan Clarke’s Penda’s Fen (1974). The last two of these feature in the January season. So is folk horror the key reference point?

Well, be careful not to move too fast. It turns out that seven and three have a private numerological significance for Jenkin. He describes himself as a typical Cornish person who “suffers from crippling superstitions”. He even had a clear image of how the number 73 would be shaped in The Volunteer’s diary, and hired a hand double to write the diary entries. The red coat that burns like a Roeg cipher or a bloody knife from a 70s Argento giallo was actually a very late decision on set. The Volunteer was originally dressed in a yellow coat, until Jenkin had a crisis, worrying he had dressed Woodvine too closely to Charlotte Gainsbourg’s character in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (2009). It was only when he overheard one of the crew confidently discussing the homage to Don’t Look Now that he twigged what he’d done. One anxiety of influence had been stopped, only for him to back into another.

This is a neat entrée into the relation of Enys Men to genre. We watch films through other films. Jenkin has spoken about common reactions to Bait and his earlier 2015 short Bronco’s House: many viewers thought that both tipped into the realm of horror, without ever quite breaking out axe or chainsaw. Bait as an avant-garde remake of Straw Dogs (1971), perhaps. Enys Men was his embrace of this suggestion, conceived as an exploration of the horror film while staying true to his principles of formal experimentation.

Jenkin is relaxed to have the film categorised as ‘folk horror’, even as the term has become so inclusive and general that it has lost its specificity. He defines the genre as “scraping away the surface of Merrie England and finding something darker underneath”. A folk horror revival in British cinema has grown up around Ben Wheatley’s films, from Kill List (2011) and A Field in England (2013) to In the Earth (2021). Wheatley’s success came alongside a wholesale archaeological recovery of lost 70s British genre film, ably aided by the BFI Flipside releases. Penda’s Fen, vanishingly rare and with a near-mythical status among fans – which include Jenkin – finally got a Blu-ray and DVD release through the BFI in 2016.

Enys Men’s use of particular legends of the standing stones and stone circles that dot the landscape also carry a lot of folk horror baggage, from Derek Jarman’s lyrical short Journey to Avebury (1971) to the Doctor Who serial ‘Stones of Blood’ (1978) or the freakish kid’s show Children of the Stones (1977). Stone circles have been kept in countercultural focus by obsessives ranging from singer Julian Cope to the comedian Stewart Lee.

Jenkin, though, insists on this being a distinctly “Cornish folk horror. Where we are, far out to the West, the surface of things has already been scraped away. It’s a different culture. We don’t have village greens, we never had them. It didn’t reach us there.”

There is a long tradition of more precisely located Cornish gothic – stretching all the way back to horror stories such as Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Ligeia’ (filmed as The Tomb of Ligeia by Roger Corman in 1964), the Dartmoor settings of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, or the weird werewolf myths collected by the Devonian folklorist Sabine Baring-Gould. Cornish gothic has become a distinct regional thing, with recent writers Wyl Menmuir and Lucy Wood exploring the landscape and shores of Cornwall to spooky effect. There have been anthologies of older tales, and academic studies by Ruth Heholt and Joan Passey.

Jenkin is less saturated in this literary tradition than movie history, and he has put some films set in Cornwall into his season, in the process recognising another probably unconscious influence. He only belatedly realised that he had used the same ruined mine in Enys Men as the haunted one at the centre of the 1984 Children’s Film Foundation movie Haunters of the Deep. Another bit of source code folded into his DNA.

We might also point to the distinct folk beliefs and practices of the southwest of England. The unnerving parade at the climax of The Wicker Man owed much to ritual May Day celebrations typical of places like Padstow in Cornwall. The amazing 1953 ethnographic record of this event, Alan Lomax’s short film Oss Oss Wee Oss, is part of the Jenkin season too. There has been a lot of work exploring these survivals and countermodern rituals – the artist Ben Edge, for instance, has made short films and paintings of these celebrations, travelling the country for his recent exhibition ‘Ritual Britain’.

If some suspect interest in these ceremonies is a nostalgic investment in an entirely fictitious Merrie England, it is also possible to see these traditions as acts of resistance to the gravitational pull of the money and power located in London. They rebel against the ongoing immiseration of rural communities that results from this structural inequality. There is a reason why Paul Wright’s rich collage of the film records of these mysterious, strangely unreadable rituals and practices, Arcadia, appeared in 2017. Some might read them on a continuum with Brexit, but they seem much more acts of resistance, a revival (or invention) of ancient and antagonistic traditions. These works seem less interested in fabled ‘sunlit uplands’ and more concerned with fiends in the furrow.

Enys Men can feel uncomfortably timely even as it starts to leave behind clock-time. The Volunteer anxiously rattles her steadily emptying petrol can: it is all that keeps the generator alive in her lonely cottage. The spectres of Cornwall’s tin miners and lost sailors hovering in the landscape speak to historical traumas. Jenkin is adamant that Enys Men is not a nostalgic rendition of 70s folk horrors, and its formal challenges certainly allow no backsliding.

For me, Jenkin’s work might be better associated with films that insist less on explicit horror than in using the editing deck as a formal device to menace the viewer with uneasy, inexplicable juxtapositions. “You make it in the edit,” Jenkin confirms. “You’ve got to foreground the device.” The horror of the edit is there in the 70s not just in Roeg’s audacious cuts or the sudden time shifts of Red Shift, but in the quieter, sinister associations generated by cross-cutting in films like Jerzy Skolimowski’s The Shout (1978). This is a crucial reference point for Enys Men – both are films in which the editing itself is the sympathetic magic at the centre of the tale told. The same goes for the unnerving, underexplained cross-cutting in Lindsey Vickers’ The Appointment (1981), another ‘lost’ film recently reissued by the BFI Flipside label. There is nothing horrific as such, only the dread induced by the cinematic cut.

And this is why Jenkin has included Agnès Varda’s Daguerréotypes (1975) and Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) to round out his season. To Jenkin, they are simply masterclasses in how to build story from the discipline of the edit.

I ask, with fingers crossed, about the next project. A ghost ship that returns to harbour after a mysterious disappearance. Like John Carpenter’s The Fog (1980)? “I’ve only recently seen it!” he replies. “And yet here’s the weird thing: some people have spotted a clear reference in Enys Men, when The Volunteer picks up a piece of wood from the shipwreck. Just like The Fog. Except I hadn’t seen it. Or maybe I have,” he ponders, “and I’ve forgotten.” Disturbing echoes, messages from outside memory. That’s exactly the compelling, dream-like experience of watching Enys Men.