Enys Men [DVD + Blu-ray]

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He picks out some influences and references in Enys Men, from Blood on Satan’s Claw to The Shout (shots of the Volunteer and the Boatman screaming) and those public information films which traumatised a generation of schoolchildren, and details some of the film’s time slippage: not only the radio announcement from the future mentioned above but also twenty-first-century music playing over that radio.

Left to her own devices, Amy meets local lad Josh (Gary Simmons), who has seen visions of a boy (Philip Martin) who speaks to him in Cornish. It’s full to the brim with haunting imagery that often feels very hallucinatory, and this is coupled with an incredibly impressionistic feel, certainly from the editing. The BFI’s booklet, available with the first pressing of this release only, runs to thirty-two pages. There’s a lot of detail here about the whys and wherefores of low-budget filmmaking, including the challenges of film production during a pandemic.

A wildlife volunteer’s daily observations of a rare flower take a dark turn into the strange and metaphysical, forcing both her and viewers to question what is real and what is nightmare. A wildlife volunteer’s (Mary Woodvine) daily observations of a rare flower take a dark turn into the strange and metaphysical, forcing both her and viewers to question what is real and what is nightmare. Cover Notes: A wildlife volunteer's daily observations of a rare flower take a dark turn into the strange and metaphysical, forcing both her and viewers to question what is real and what is nightmare.

A wildlife volunteer on an uninhabited island off the British coast descends into a terrifying madness that challenges her grip on reality and pushes her into a living nightmare. That folk horror comes from the film’s, and its maker’s Cornish heritage, a part of the country with its own ancient language and almost an island with the river Tamar not quite cutting it off from the rest of the English mainland. The eerie ethno-mysticism of Jenkin influences The Shout (1978), The Last Wave (1977) and Walkabout (1971) also lie in Enys Men’s unquiet soil, where the films’ Aboriginal earth-magic becomes Cornish.Judah’s essay elucidates the film – though, with this one, your interpretation may differ – pointing up the use of ritual elements and the view of the natural world from which the film’s stranger elements erupt.