Watched Enys Men (2023) A Cornish Yume Nikki Like

30 10月 2023

according to wikipedia, this is an "experimental folk horror movie" by mark jenkins. that's one way to describe it.

i'm a fan of the director's previous movie Bait, a black-and-white film movie about the class tensions between cornish fishermen and english tourists, so i've been looking forward to this movie for a while.

so i expected something steeped in cornish mythology and "retro" filmmaking. i got both, but the movie is far more experimental than i expected. Bait, in the end, is a traditional story; in Enys Men, we watch this one unnamed woman repeatedly perform the same routines forever and ever. the repetition is extreme, forcing us to search for diminutive changes in the most mundane of shots.

and yet, these changes are jarring and strange: the ordinary becomes un-ordinary; we start to observe everything natural as unnatural; and the pieces of backstory are so fractured that the viewing experience can never be complete without repeated watches.

my partner compared it to a RPG Maker horror-like and yeah, i thought of Yume Nikki too. but that game is at least more "friendly": we're traversing through fantastical realms, even if most of it is empty walking. here, we just watch the film take its own time and then suddenly we get a pastor singing a song or miners smiling at us. despite the entire movie taking on an island, these montages stretch time and space through peculiar usages of match cuts and other elliptical film editing.

i come out of the movie utterly unsure what i watched but changed. what makes this movie so unique to me is how it doesn't explain anything; we're just tracking this one character experience everyday life in disjointed time and space on this island and there's no rhyme or reason for any of these pretty shots. it's a baffling, beautiful, and boring movie that engrossed me till the end. the movie challenges us: it wants us to understand how it's depicting traumatic memories of the past in sequential, chronological time in film.

i don't expect people to flock to this movie, but for those who are willing to take the plunge, they will be deeply rewarded. it's an unbelievable work that interrogates film as a communicative medium and estranges the audience so hard that they have to think about its production. jenkins may be one of the more interesting filmmakers of this generation.