ENYS MEN In Mark Jenkin’s rapturously received 2019 film Bait, Mary Woodvine played an affluent out-of-towner, buying up a beloved family home to serve as her posh summer house. In Enys Men, she plays another newcomer, but it’s like she’s not just come to another town, but another planet in another century. Ostensibly set on an uninhabited island off Cornwall in the early ’70s, Enys Men slips out of time and place altogether, an uncanny island in the stream of memory and imagination.
Woodvine is a volunteer researcher, tasked with recording the blooming of strange clifftop flowers through the spring of 1973. She’s alone in a dilapidated cottage, reliant on her petrol generator to power the shortwave radio and tea kettle, but also cursed public information films like . It’s the high tide of folk horror, a genre that , with its unquiet ghosts and roaming menhirs, skirts.
