Writer-director Mark Jenkin’s followup to his 2019 breakthrough feature Bait sees an unnamed volunteer, played by Mary Woodvine, tasked with studying plant life on a small isle off the coast of Cornwall: Enys Men is Cornish for ‘Stone Island’. Remote and otherwise uninhabited, as days pass the boundaries between the real and imagined – not to mention the past, present, and future – begin to dissolve, plunging Woodvine into a cyclical nightmare from which there seems to be no escape.

Set (at least initially) in 1973, Enys Men directly channels the look and feel of the eerie British children’s television of that era, shot on hand-cranked 16mm colour film stock with overdubbed audio. The film’s unique production approach, disinterest in linear storytelling and fetishisation of texture – the camera regularly lingers on wave-lapped rocks, ivy-covered brickwork and the rusted metals of abandoned outposts – all mean that Enys Men takes the form of an extended, folk-horror-tinged tone poem rather than any kind of conventional drama. Where Bait’s formal experimentation is belied by its relatively straightforward plotting and easy-to-parse exploration of gentrification along the Cornish coast, Enys Men instead asks its audience to work almost as hard as its raincoat-clad researcher, challenging us to pick up on all of its various throughlines and decipher their cumulative meaning.

It’s rewarding work, though. As we’re barraged with image and sound – as with Bait, Jenkin also composed the film’s drone-led score – we fall in line with Enys Men’s own, dreamlike logic, and the patterns that begin to emerge within its overlapping timelines lay bare the history of the island and its myriad past traumas. Ultimately, Enys Men serves as an abstract meditation on loneliness, isolation and the jumbled and chaotic nature of memory. Throw in some lichen-based body horror for good measure and the result is a unique and ambitious cinematic experience quite unlike any other.

Dir. Mark Jenkin (15, 91 mins)

Enys Men is out now in cinemas

words JOSH HICKS