Editor’s Note: Nick Johnston attended this year’s Boston Underground Film Festival (it was a short commute), reviewing a selection of the films presented over several days at The Brattle in Cambridge. Be sure to revisit all our continued BUFF coverage, from 2023 and years past.
Is there any better return on investment in genre filmmaking than in English folk horror? Just think: If you’re making a movie like Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men, all you really need is a small crew, a camera, and some wide-open spaces. Hell, throw in some film and a Steenbeck in there as well, and you’ve got a vibes-based movie that will wow on the fall festival circuit and get enough people interested in checking it out that you’ll practically overwhelm the box office with swarms of angry ticket-buyers looking for a refund. Such are the vagaries in crafting vague metaphoric art-horror with few of the creature entertainments that satisfied those who saw Midsommar or laughed their way through The Lighthouse: Sometimes you create evocative and terrifying images that linger in the back of one’s mind like a scene from a feverish nightmare, and sometimes you just manage to test even the patience of a battle-hardened moron like myself. Enys Men did the latter.
Fittingly, Enys Men takes place on a pastoral island in the Year of Our Lord 1973, where an isolated English botanist goes about her work. Much of the film’s first half-hour is dedicated to documenting her routine in detail: she leaves early in the morning to survey the bunch of rare flowers that she’s there to study, drops a rock down a mine shaft on the way back to her small cottage, turns on the generator to make her tea and listen to the radio, records her observations (usually “No changes”) and then turns in for the night. She’s haunted by an assortment of mental apparitions — a young girl, the former inhabitants of the island’s mining colony, etc. — but things only start to truly go bug-nuts when she notices a lichen starting to form on one of the flowers. With her gas and tea running low, she does what everybody else does in these circumstances: she wigs out, in the sort of flat way that a character in a destined-for-the-arthouse usually does, and Jenkins goes out of his way to stress both the boredom and mildness of this scenario.
It’s hard to outright dismiss Enys Men simply because of how thoroughly Jenkin tries to recreate the aesthetic and atmospherics of ’70s folk horror. Its set-ups and compositions are often impeccably realized, at least in the imagery and pacing, with the lush color of era-appropriate film and the faux-aging applied to it endowing the viewer with a sense that they’re watching something made in that decade that was lost to history, perhaps spending some of the last fifty years in the basement of some Brighton chophouse. But this is sort of a double-edged sword, as the modern technology — specifically within the multichannel sound mix, with the tinny vocals isolated to a few speakers while the booming score blasts throughout the rest of the auditorium — betrays some of this illusory quality. Even worse, Jenkin indulges in the worst aspects of modern “elevated” horror filmmaking through his stodgy abstraction, with few entry points for one to engage with the work as either a scary yarn or a dreamy survey of isolated emotion.
This is the Achilles’ heel of Enys Men and its ilk. If one hones in solely on the aesthetics and vibes of its predecessors in crafting a tribute, it can be pretty easy to lose your grasp on what exactly made those films so special and intriguing. The Wicker Man, after all, is practically a musical and has all of the genre’s characteristics: defined personalities, conflict, and an understanding that some form of clarity only enhances the terror. The same can be said for so many of its contemporaries — The Blood on Satan’s Claw, Psychomania, Witchfinder General — which hold their iconic status for their merger of cinematic skill with the fun of good (and occasionally silly!) storytelling. When you’re confronted with a dour imitation full of substandard Lynchian dream logic and occasional feints towards something more interesting, it’s no wonder that one might long for Vincent Price to show up and start burning folks at the stake. I’ll say this, though: I’ve always wondered what might happen when a Brit runs out of tea on an isolated island, and Jenkin at least provides a very plausible answer to that question in how he depicts his lead’s descent into madness. Caffeine withdrawal is a fucking nightmare.