Mark Jenkin’s follow-up to ‘Bait’ to be previewed in Bristol

Back in 2019, Cornish filmmaker Mark Jenkin’s 16mm drama Bait became an unexpected commercial and critical hit, taking more than half-a-million pounds at the UK box office and winning a BAFTA for Outstanding Debut. Locally, this word-of-mouth hit packed ’em in at the Watershed for weeks on end.

Now Jenkin is back with his follow-up, Enys Men – a Kernewek (Cornish) phrase meaning Stone Island – which was once again shot on 16mm, but in colour rather than black and white this time. It’s a Wicker Man-esque folk horror set in 1973 on an uninhabited island off the Cornish coast, where a wildlife volunteer’s daily observations of a rare flower take a dark turn into the strange and metaphysical.

“It had been suggested to me on more than one occasion that there were moments in Bait, and Bronco’s House (the short that preceded it), where it felt like things were tipping over into horror,” says Jenkin. “The sense of dread and foreboding that underpinned the narrative of both of those films seemed to play to certain conventions of the genre. It was not something that I had consciously intended when making these films and on completion I considered both of them to be relatively straight dramas. Nonetheless it got me intrigued as to the proposition of making my own horror film.

“Almost inevitably, considering the setting, the idea was inclined towards Folk Horror. Most obviously the inclusion of the standing stone and the surrounding myths, but also the role of ritual, and the active participation of the elements. For me Folk Horror has very English connotations. The stripping away of a pastoral layer of Merrie England to reveal an earlier Celtic and pagan past full of perceived brutality, deviance and threat. I wanted this film to be specifically Cornish. In a sense I was already starting one layer deeper, from the already uncovered brutal pagan past with only one place left to go: further underground, far into the earth, through the living rock itself.”

The Cornish language poster for Enys Men

Enys Men is released nationwide on January 13, 2023. But you can get to see this most eagerly anticipated of Britflicks before anyone else at a preview screening with a director Q&A at the Watershed on Saturday 7 January. Go here for tickets.

Jenkin has also curated a film season highlighting The Cinematic DNA of Enys Men. This takes in such classics as Walkabout, The Long Weekend, Berberian Sound Studio and David Lynch’s Lost Highway, alongside some of the best BBC productions of the 1970s, including several ghost stories for Christmas plus Alan Clarke’s Panda’s Fen and Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape. Selections from the programme will be screened at the Watershed in January, with tickets on sale soon.

Main pic: Mary Woodvine in Enys Men. Credit: Bosena Productions