Comprehension test

"I like the Bresson quote, 'It's more important to feel the film than to understand the film.'" So said director and screenwriter Mark Jenkin in conversation with the Quietus' Darren Hayman about Enys Men. That explains a lot.

Enys Men is certainly a film that you feel rather than understand. As Josh Hicks noted in his review for Buzz, there is a "fetishisation of texture - the camera regularly lingers on wave-lapped rocks, ivy-covered brickwork and the rusted metals of abandoned outposts". This textural quality extends to the film's grainy visual look (a result of the decision to shoot exclusively on 16 mm) and also its eerie drone soundtrack, composed by Jenkin himself, punctuated occasionally by birdsong and the noise of a petrol-powered generator.

That generator is critical to the connection of the unnamed central protagonist (Mary Woodvine) to the outside world. Stuck on the stone island of the title to record and keep watch over the local flora, with only disembodied voices from the radio for company, she succumbs to delusions and hallucinations. Like The Shining, Enys Men is less a horror film and more a psychological depiction of how the mind copes (or fails to cope) with extreme isolation, its power derived from an overwhelming sense of apprehension and dread rather than gratuitous gore.

To describe it as portraying the character's descent into madness, though, would be misleading, as that would imply a linearity that the film deliberately resists and disrupts. The sequence of events is blurred, and the use of mirror images messes with the viewer's head.

Some films are like jigsaw puzzles that leave you marvelling at the way in which all of the individual pieces neatly interlock at the end. Enys Men, by contrast, is a jigsaw puzzle with no straight edges, plenty of missing pieces and no picture on the box. All you can do is absorb and enjoy its stunning scenes and look out for little clues and connections that might enable you to make some semblance of sense of what's going on. Suffice to say that few films warrant a rewatch more than this one.