The reason why people often joke about how nobody wants to hear someone else’s dreams is that they are personal experiences that often do not make any sense to others and can never be adequately conveyed; they are what therapists get paid to listen to. However, much of art is like this: individuals or groups speaking to people about their dream.
In 1978, Joan Didion famously said so in an interview with The Paris Review when asked to explain her earlier statement about writing being a hostile act. “Sometimes you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else’s dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream,” she responded.
This new film has been highly praised and it is called Enys Men which is more of a horror movie than anything else. It’s an extremely druggy film and feels at times like watching some woman’s nightmares—though not the overtly dark Lynchian kind of being considered ‘nightmarish’. For a very select group of viewers (mostly critics and intellectuals), this will be greatly effective; for most people, it will be interminably boring.
By contrast, perhaps it was actually intentional on the part of the filmmaker. Indeed, Enys Men appears as though it concerns a woman going mad after having been caught up in an eternal cycle of tedium and repetition. She starts hallucinating by experiencing different moments all at once, possibly seeing ghosts from her past among other things. By the end of the film, though, most viewers might just wish they were capable of becoming mad in order to alleviate all the boredom even slightly through hallucination.
On Cornish Island ‘Enys Men’ takes place (the title means Stone Island in Cornish), where The Volunteer (Mary Woodvine) apparently leads an isolated existence governed by ritual. A little bit older, this woman has lines in her face and a long scar that runs right across her belly. She reads a volume named A Blueprint for Survival which was actually a text appearing in a 1971 issue of The Ecologist; it is one of the earliest scientific warnings about apocalyptic climate change, indicating the allegorical nature of the film.
It’s not clear what she is doing or volunteering for on the island. She keeps a diary telling us that it is late April 1973, and she records temperature and observations. Every day, she simply writes “No changes” as her notes. Changes to what? Her days consist of running the generator, going for walks along the stony cliffs, checking seven white flowers, and tossing one stone a day down a caliginous well. There is an old inoperative mine at the bottom of all that darkness. She gazed at one solitary bird flying over her head while bathing and making desperate efforts to get through on radios so that she may know whether there will be petrol in 1st May consignment from London to keep her dying generator alive among other supplies.
With little dialogue or purpose, the days drag on. Something is happening in the woman’s head as strange editing and off images of incongruity suggest it. It is possible that a young girl lives in a different room of the house; she might be some sort of apparition from The Volunteer’s memories, or perhaps a ghost, or even an older lady when she was younger. She prefers to stand on dangerous positions on top of the shambled overgrown house and rarely do they notice her.
Alternative visions appear– seven bal maidens (ladies who were once employed by the mines to do dirty work), filthy men hidden below ground in mine shafts, an old preacher dressed like one from 19th century. Has block universe theory been proved or she is going insane? What do visions imply? What is happening? Well that could be a wrong question. “Why should we care?” would have been more appropriate.
In 1968, this movie premiered titled The Longest Most Meaningless Movie in the World which lasted for forty-eight hours. It may not be literally unwatchable like that but at times it can feel like you have wasted 48 hours of your life. Indeed, it has heavy layers of intentional obscurity that certains viewers will probably appreciate, but ‘long’ and ‘meaninglessness’ are good words for most people.
It was called psychological horror film although it never really became one at all. It has got some eerie atmosphere about it but it feels more like detective story of self-indulgent hiding for puzzles solving audience than anything else. Enys Men deliberately remains ambiguous to the point where it almost becomes incomprehensible and I find myself wondering if there isn’t any real mystery behind this movie besides someone being killed – others may interpreted Enys Men differently with respect to its true plotlines.What does this title mean?
This is because at face value this film chronicles a woman who goes insane after spending a long time alone.
Boredom can drive someone to madness. Many horror films depict this, from Repulsion to The Lighthouse, but they are also scary in their own right. This reading does not hold true for Enys Men, which provides so few scares and possible interpretations that it is hard to accept. Why is she losing her mind? Why these particular images? The viewer isn’t even given information about the character herself, other than the fact that she fell through glass and has a scar. Ultimately, most audiences won’t care whether she’s sane or insane, and how The Volunteer became one or another.
One might draw some line of thought through those lines; however, when pieced together properly, it adds up to very little at all. Bait was Jenkins’ previous film where he directed about sociopolitical themes like gentrification and the modern world taking over Cornwall. Almost everything about this movie seems Cornish as well as being focused on mining industry along with its links with climate change and labor rights.
The already mentioned bal maidens that briefly appear in Enys Men had really bad working conditions and this led to health problems. It is also possible that these ghostly miners beneath the island could be other exploited labourers who might have died during a mine collapse. Although the mining industry was a significant aspect of life in Cornwall, it has obviously been on a sharp decline everywhere, with its repercussions still being felt by both nature and society even today. The seven flowers that gradually die throughout Enys Men indicate how all this can be true.
Indeed, the film is slowly moving towards May 1st, 1973 which was a legendary May Day. On this day British workers were celebrating their rights while over four hundred thousand of them went on strike only in Midlands. Mayday!” someone can hear shouting from the radio in Enys Men. Obviously, this emergency word may correspond to the events of that May Day.
However what does it mean? Experimental films can be analyzed and meaning discovered but does that compensate for all the tedium, confusion, time-wasting involved? For most people it doesn’t. Yes there are those who will enjoy putting together pieces of this puzzle right here. Others will probably just get absorbed into it; through its decomposing celluloid Bolex 16mm film stock, unsubtle aesthetics of badly preserved seventies-looking film as well as an unending atmospheric score; definitely has ambiance.
Mark Jenkin should be cloned into thousands more filmmakers since he is sole director,, cinematographer, writer as well s composer own his work’s film. His vision is distinct and he cares deeply about his craft; he even made whole movie in carbon-neutral way along with his crew as opposed to average 3 tons of CO2 per film produced by most movies. He’s so inspirational and such a radical filmmaker whose style combines English folk horror (think Wicker Man) with Nicolas Roeg’s editing style and Look Around You’s 70s pastiche.
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