FIRST PRESSING ONLY** Fully illustrated booklet featuring new writing on the film by William Fowler and Jason Wood among others

In his essay The Weird and the Eerie (2016), the academic Mark Fisher defined eeriness as "constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of presence". That is, for Fisher, the eerie "occurs either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or if there is nothing present when there should be something". Enys Men falls into the former camp, where the island should be absence made manifest, but instead provides spectres of class trauma breaking the volunteer's solitude. The local industry and its demise is the most unsettled ghost of the film. Jenkin likes montages. We see the patterned grille of a battered Dansette transistor radio in an almost abstract close-up, a rattling red generator located just outside the house and a jar of Seven Maids Dried Skimmed Milk, a fictional brand that foreshadows a strikingly odd scene later on. Love film and TV? Join BBC Culture Film and TV Club on Facebook, a community for cinephiles all over the world.

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The critically acclaimed mind-bending folk horror, Enys Men is set for Dual Format Edition (Blu-ray/DVD) and the simultaneous exclusive streaming release on BFI Player from May. Kingsley Marshall, head of Film & Television at Falmouth, who worked as an executive producer of the film, describes the impact for students: “The Sound/Image Cinema Lab embeds real experiences for students into their time at the university. It helps that many of our partners work with students in the university, and Mark and Denzil are no exception – totally integrating the students into their crew and helping them build their confidence in the practical application of filmmaking. For sound effects, Jenkin used a synthesizer, wired up to a tape loop, which created echoes and sound distortions. He stood on a piece of fake wooden flooring to record footsteps. Set in 1973 on an uninhabited island off the Cornish coast, a wildlife volunteer's daily observations of a rare flower turn into a metaphysical journey that forces her as well as the viewer to question what is real and what is nightmare. [3] Enys Men" doesn't explain itself. This may be frustrating for some. I found it compelling, not just stylistically but emotionally. It called to mind, on some level, Chantal Akerman's "Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles," in its devotion to repetition, in its patience in noticing small changes, in breaking down the routine into something strange, even threatening. There's tension in the monotony. When change comes, it drops from the sky like a menacing anvil.

Enys Men is a mind-bending Cornish folk horror set in 1973 that unfolds on an uninhabited island off the Cornish coast. Jenkin has a second preoccupation alongside his analogue sensibility: the landscape and culture of his native Cornwall. While Bait was a deeply modern tale of Cornish gentrification told with old technology, Enys Men reflects that same local interest but with stronger cohesion between the old filmic form and its period setting. When considering the DNA of Enys Men, it’s maybe predictable that many of the films that made it onto the following list are drawn from the 70s – the decade in which the film is grounded. Inevitably, when thinking of this era in Britain, a number of entries on the list are not in fact films at all, but highly innovative, haunting, weird or eerie, productions made for the small screen. Some of them are free-form, others experimental or oblique, yet all are uncompromisingly authored.Sitges' Universe Expands With New Titles From the Most Contemporary, Audacious Fantastic Genre". sitgesfilmfestival.com. 28 July 2022 . Retrieved 8 October 2023. No sound is recorded on set, with Jenkin relying on post synch for audio. “For me going into the edit with total silence is a brilliant starting point,” he says. It’s both a budgetary and creative choice, with no attempt at realism. On-stage Q&A interview with Mark Jenkin and Mary Woodvine by film critic Mark Kermode at BFI Southbank (2022) Scovell, Adam (12 January 2023). "Enys Men: The films that frighten us in unexplainable ways". BBC Culture . Retrieved 15 January 2023.

As identified by Macfarlane and others, the eerie acts as a kind of counter-tradition to the romantic Pastoralism of English art; rather than portraying the English countryside as a place of chocolate-box fantasy, it has often zoned in on specific rural localities and tried to convey their haunted essences that are beyond the understanding of urbanite considerations. UK / 2022 / colour / 90 mins / English language with optional subtitles for the Deaf and partial hearing, plus optional audio description / original aspect ratio 1.45:1 // BD50: 1080p, 24fps, DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 audio and DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 stereo audio / DVD9: PAL, 25fps, Dolby Digital 5.1 audio and Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo audio a b "Enys Men: Film poster a Cornish language breakthrough". BBC News. 6 December 2022 . Retrieved 15 January 2023. The 1970s saw a wealth of films deal with the decidedly strange atmospheres of English landscapes in a similar fashion – films such as David Gladwell's Requiem for a Village (1976), Peter Hall's Akenfield (1974), both set in Suffolk, and Philip Trevelyan's Sussex-centred documentary The Moon and the Sledgehammer (1971). All of these mix documentary aesthetics and a desire to capture life in the countryside with stranger elements, whether it be people rising from their graves, as in Gladwell's film, or overlapping time periods, as in Hall's. The film is set in 1973 on an uninhabited island off the Cornish coast. Mary Woodvine plays a wildlife volunteer’s who’s daily observations of a rare flower take her on a metaphysical journey which causes her to question what is real and what is torment.

What to know

What all of this means is never stated outright. Things don't "add up." That's fine with me. I was riveted by every moment of this haunting weird film. "Enys Men" made me legitimately uneasy. In his current BFI season The Cinematic DNA of Enys Men, Jenkin juxtaposes the Cornish-set Children’s Film Foundation production Haunters of the Deep with the Australian eco-chiller Long Weekend (“their crime was against nature!”) and José Ramón Larraz’s atmospheric British psychodrama Symptoms. But it’s Lawrence Gordon Clark’s Stigma , made in 1977 as part of the BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas series, that offers the most intriguing touchstone, sharing with Enys Men an atmosphere of uncanny weirdness, closely aligned with the writings of MR James, or John Wyndham.