Notes From The Program Director | Week of April 21st, 2023

Enys Men is truly a singular experience, really wonderful stuff. The opening elements of the film are fairly straightforward: a woman, living alone on an uninhabited island off the British coast, carries out the simple, daily task of studying and recording island plantlife, one flower in particular. But the straightforward ends, and strange things start to happen, things that suggest either the island is haunted--or the woman’s mind is. It’s a beautifully patient build as the narrative and tone become slowly but increasingly unsettling and surreal, eventually evoking a half-waking dream where time collapses and a nightmare intrudes, where the normal markers of daily life--a morning cup of tea, a book before bed--take on a menacing quality that cannot really be explained. 

Throughout, Jenkin also uses carefully composed frames, beautiful grainy 16 mm film, nerve jangling sound design, and vibrant color--especially red and yellow motifs--to their full effect, and the repetition of objects--a rock, a bit of lichen, a red gas can, a hole in the ground, a woman’s boot--evokes resonant, half-obscured meanings.

The recent surprise indie-horror hit Skinamarink has some similarities to this film though Enys Men is less overtly scary and more formally rigorous. Much like the best aspects of Skinamarink, however, the narrative thrust is largely built on somehow-frightening everyday objects, the repetition of certain images, highly subjective feelings, and nightmare-like associations rather than a clearly linear arc.  I was also reminded of the work of brilliant filmmaker Maya Deren, her surreal and dreamlike short films, whose striking, psychologically complex images always result in my simultaneous discomfort and exhilaration. And like Deren’s work, there’s also a thematic richness to this film that is often absent in modern-day horror-adjacent films, where tension often relies merely on jump scares that leave no lingering resonance. Here, instead, there’s a deeper thing going on, a reflection on the human experience of time, of memory, of loss, and of mortality. It’s fantastic.

And if the tension-filled Enys Men isn’t quite your style, we’ve got River, the Doctober film that sold out both of its regular Doctober screenings as well as the additional encore show. And no wonder! Featuring lush cinematography, the music of Jonny Greenwood, and narration of Willem Dafoe, it’s a feast of visual and aural delights. As we noted in our Doctober calendar, “River takes its audience on a journey through space and time, spanning six continents, and drawing on extraordinary contemporary cinematography, including satellite filming, showing rivers on scale and from perspectives never seen before. Its union of image, music, and sparse, poetic script is both dream-like and powerful, honoring the wildness of rivers but also recognizing their vulnerability.”