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Watch: The Making of Enys Men (Exclusive Premiere)
Today, NEON exclusively premieres a nearly 14-minute featurette with Filmmaker on the making of Cornish writer-director Mark Jenkin’s experimental folk horror film Enys Men. Jenkin and the film’s star, Mary Woodvine, take viewers behind the scenes of the shoot and detail their individual processes while making the film.
In his review out of Cannes, Blake Williams summarized the film’s loose plot and stylistic leanings:
Set in 1973, Enys Men (Cornish for “Stone Island” and is pronounced—if I recall correctly—AYN-is Mayn) is an image-forward movie drenched in the kind of dense, thick film grain you can find in e.g. the work of Ben Rivers or Samuel M. Delgado & Helena Girón. Primary colors veritably bleed off the screen as we watch a woman (British TV actor Mary Woodvine, also in Bait) after she arrives to observe an unusual flower that’s appeared on the isle. Just as the image’s graininess never lets you forget that you’re looking at an image, conspicuous foley work verges on cartoonish, with isolated radio noise, footsteps and creaking doors amplified to the point where they become haptic. Zoom lenses and an infinite depth of field are likewise put to good use, destabilizing our sense of scale. (Woodvine tends to step right into the frame as though a giant, her boots way too large relative to other objects in the frame.)
In the featurette, Jenkin shares a lot of great insight regarding his artistic intent on the project, much of which he also discussed in a joint interview with him and Woodvine that appeared in our recent Winter issue.
[You know] that analogy of a horror film picking up the audience, leading them into the darkest corner of the forest, scaring the shit out of them and then leading them safely back out again? I like the horror films where you get led into the forest, then the filmmaker just disappears and you’re just left there, you know? At the end of Twin Peaks: The Return, Lynch just leads you into the darkest bit of the forest and just fucks off.
Watch the video above, and catch Enys Men in theaters on March 31. For details on upcoming showtimes that include Q&As with Jenkin, visit NEON’s official website.
