Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Enys Men’ on Hulu, A Tale of Isolation Giving Folk Horror A New Sound

Perhaps it might help to explain the pronunciation of Enys Men (now on Hulu) before attempting to dive into any of the film’s mysteries. In Cornish, an extinct and revived language from the film’s setting of Cornwall, it means “Stone Island” and is said like “In-Is Mane.” But that’s about the only part of the film requiring such dogmatic detail to grasp – everything else you can just feel like smoke gradually seeping into your lungs before suffocating you with utter fear.

ENYS MEN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: In 1973, a volunteer (Mary Woodvine) on a deserted Cornish island dutifully records the status of a flower every day. For a while, her unexplained task seems mind-numbingly repetitive to everyone but her. That all begins to change once she observes a fungal lichen growing on the flower, casting everything in an increasingly sinister light and disrupting the predictable rhythms of her days. The hallucinatory, psychological journey forces the volunteer into confrontation with her tenuous grip on reality. The longer we spend with her in Enys Men, the more we begin to share her disorientation.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Imagine the isolation of The Shining combined with the folk horror of The Lighthouse (and maybe a pinch of The Wicker Man) … and yet somehow entirely its own beast.

Performance Worth Watching: With all this talk of nepo casting’s effect on movies, let’s point out that it does occasionally work. Mary Woodvine is absolutely mesmeric as The Volunteer. She’s patient in letting the nightmare of the film work its way through her performance as seen through the slow unraveling of her routine. The film lives and dies on the strength of her work because without investment in her character, all of filmmaker Mark Jenkin’s cinematic bravura would just be smoke and mirrors.

Memorable Dialogue: The most memorable sound is something eerily created in foley and laid over the images. But if there’s a line of dialogue that stands out, there’s a chilling exchange when the volunteer is asked “Do you like it here on your own?” She coolly replies, “I’m not on my own.”

Sex and Skin: There’s some nudity in a non-sexual context – think similar to how there’s “nudity” in The Shining.

Our Take: A little bit of tech talk that might explain why Enys Men is unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. Filmmaker Mark Jenkin shoots on 16mm film – with no sound. He’s not recording anything on-site, so everything you’re hearing in the film has been explicitly layered on in post-production. Silence, not noise, is the default – and you come to realize just how piercing every single sonic choice in a work can become when executed with such intentionality.

You don’t need to know or understand this, though, to have Enys Men seep under your skin. It’s a terrifying vision of isolation’s effects on the mind that you can simply feel. Though set in fifty years ago, the film recalls those mind-numbing days of the early pandemic when time and reality seemed to lose meaning. Jenkin’s craftsmanship and confidence in selling his local, specific vision of folk horror resonate globally with anyone who’s felt a slipping sanity in the absence of social contact.

Our Call: STREAM IT! Like nothing you’ve ever heard (or seen), Enys Men announces a new master of folk storytelling. This handcrafted horror film is a trip straight to hell. Mark Jenkin proves Jean-Paul Sartre’s oft-repeated maxim wrong. Hell is other people? False, The Volunteer’s experience attests. Hell is no other people but yourself.

Marshall Shaffer is a New York-based freelance film journalist. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared on Slashfilm, Slant, The Playlist and many other outlets. Some day soon, everyone will realize how right he is about Spring Breakers.