There's a reason people joke that no one wants to hear someone else's dreams. They are personal experiences that often have no meaning to anyone and can never really be adequately communicated; they are something we pay therapists to listen to. However, in a way, a lot of art is like this: a person or a collective trying to tell people about their dream.
Joan Didion once famously said it in an interview with The Paris Review in 1978, when she was asked to clarify why writing is a hostile act. "Often you want to tell someone your dream, your nightmare. Well, no one wants to hear about someone else's dream, good or bad; no one wants to walk around with it. The writer is always trying to trick the reader into listening to the dream," replied Didion.
The critically acclaimed new film, Eny's menis a so-called horror film that takes this quite literally. It's an extremely dreamy movie, and often feels like watching a woman's nightmares, though not the explicitly dark, Lynchian kind often thought of as "nightmarish." For a very select group of viewers (mostly critics and intellectuals) this will be hugely effective; for most people it will be endlessly boring.
Perhaps that is the intention. Eny's men seems to follow a woman who loses her grip on reality and temporality after being caught in an endless cycle of boredom and repetition. She begins to hallucinate, experiencing several moments at once and perhaps witnessing ghosts from the past. By the end of the movie, most viewers might wish they were graced with a touch of hallucinatory madness to distract from all the boredom as well.
What is Enys Men about?
Eny's men is set on an island in Cornwall (Stone Island, the Cornish translation of the title), where a woman known only as The Volunteer (Mary Woodvine) seems to lead an isolated and ritualistic existence. She is a slightly older woman, with detailed lines on her face and a long scar across her abdomen. She is reading a book titled A blueprint for survival, which is actually a text originally published in a 1971 issue of The Ecologist; it is one of the earliest scientific warnings about apocalyptic climate change, hinting at the allegorical meaning behind the film.
It is not entirely clear what The Volunteer does on the island, or what she volunteers for. She keeps a diary informing the viewer that it is the end of April 1973, and she keeps track of the temperature and her observations. Day after day, her observations were simply, "No changes." Changes to what? Her days consist of running the generator, walking along the rocky cliffs, checking seven white flowers and throwing one stone a day into a giant pit. At the bottom of all that darkness lies an old, deactivated mine. She watches a single bird fly overhead, takes a bath, and attempts to communicate by radio, eagerly awaiting the delivery of supplies on May 1, including gas for her dying generator.
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The days drag on, with little to no dialogue or purpose. Strange editing and incongruous footage suggest that something is going on in the woman's head. A young girl may or may not live in another room of the house; she may or may not be an apparition of the volunteer's memories, a ghost, or the older woman at a younger age. She likes to stand on top of the overgrown, dilapidated house in precarious places, and she is mostly ignored.
Other visions begin to appear - seven balmaids (women once employed by the mines to perform manual labor), dirty men hidden underground in the mine shafts, an old preacher in 19th century garb. Will the block universe theory be proven or will it go crazy? What do the visions suggest > What's going on? Well, that may be the wrong question. One should more accurately ask, "Why should we care?"
Enys Men isn't a scary movie - it's a slow mystery
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In 1968, a 48-hour movie premiered titled The longest most meaningless film in the world. Eny's men is certainly not one of those movies that is literally unwatchable, but it can feel like it is 48 hours long and completely pointless. Yes, it cloaks itself with hidden meanings that certain viewers will be happy to dissect; for the rest of us, "long and meaningless" is enough terms.
The movie has been described as a psychological horror movie, but it's honestly not that at all. It's a little creepy, but it's more of a mystery, a self-indulgent exercise in obscuration that invites viewers to solve the puzzles. Eny's men is so deliberately puzzling and verging on incomprehensible that the story is not mysterious, but rather the mystery itself - different people will have a different view of what the actual plot of Eny's men is even. At its most superficial, the film simply describes a woman going mad after a long period of loneliness.
Fine, boredom can certainly drive a person insane. Horror cinema has a great line for portraying this Repulsion Unpleasant The lighthousebut movies like this are scary and mean something at the same time. Eny's men offers so little fear and potential meaning that this interpretation falls flat. Why is she losing her mind? Why these specific images? The viewer doesn't even get any information about the character herself, other than that she fell through glass and has a scar. In the end, most viewers don't care if she's sane or insane, and how The Volunteer came to be one or the other.
Perhaps mining is the meaning of Enys Men
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There is one interpretation that might provide a method to this madness, but putting the pieces together still doesn't add up to much. The last film from director Mark Jenkins, Acewas socio-political in nature, about gentrification and the modern world invading Cornwall. Eny's men is also extremely Cornish and seems preoccupied with the mining industry and its relationship to climate change and labor rights.
The aforementioned ball girls, who appear briefly in Eny's men, were often treated to poor working conditions and developed health problems as a result of their work for the mining companies. The ghostly miners beneath the island appear to be other mistreated workers who may have died in a mining accident. The mining industry was hugely important in Cornwall but has clearly experienced a major decline everywhere, while its effects on the environment and former workers are visible to this day. The seven flowers, indicative of the seven ball girls, slowly die Eny's menwhich could represent all this.
Of course, the movie slowly marches towards May 1, 1973, which was a May Day for centuries. That holiday celebrates workers' rights, and on that date, in 1973, more than 400,000 British workers marched in the Midlands alone. In Eny's men, someone can be heard on the radio yelling, "Mayday!" The emergency word could certainly be related to that protest on May 1.
Mark Jenkin creates a unique atmosphere
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But where does this take us? An experimental film can be analyzed and meaning discovered, but does that relieve the boredom, confusion and waste of time? Not for most people. Yes, some people will enjoy putting the puzzle together here. Others may just be mesmerized by it Eny's men; with the decrepit celluloid of his Bolex 16mm film, the unsubtle aesthetic of a poorly preserved 1970s film, and the incessantly atmospheric score, it certainly has an atmosphere.
There should be more filmmakers like Mark Jenkin, the film's director, cinematographer, writer and composer. He is passionate and has a very clear vision; he and his crew also shot the entire film in a carbon-neutral manner, compared to the 3,000 tons of carbon produced on average by most films. He is an inspirational and truly iconoclastic author, whose work combines English folk horror such as The Wicker Man with Nicolas Roeg's montage and 1970s throwbacks from Look around you.
Jenkin definitely has cool dreams to tell viewers about. Enys men, however, is not one of them. It's a mysteriously jumbled affair that might be interesting to glimpse in a museum, but is pretentiously boring to watch as a movie. Film4 Productions presents Eny's men, a Bosena production in collaboration with Sound Image Cinema Lab. NEON will distribute the film from March 31.
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