Stone | Enys Men

Haunted, living, sacred.

I caught up late to Mark Jenkin's hypnotic Enys Men, right before I took a 10-day trip to Ireland. While I traveled, I spent some time ruminating on the film—on its sense of place and especially on one of its defining elements. Some spoilers below so, if that's important to you, watch the film before you read.

Peter Weir’s classic Picnic at Hanging Rock owes its prevailing sense of uncanny mystery to its haunting visuals, its performances, its withholding script, but also to the striking geological formation of its title. It isn’t just a film about disappearances but about disappearances at Hanging Rock—a gorgeous, imposing, distinct formation of stone. There’s something mystical about that enormous pile of stone that drives the mystery.* Hanging Rock makes a connection with stone taken up by Mark Jenkin in his 2022 art horror feature Enys Men, where there is not a single, resonant stone location among others, but where stone is everywhere throughout, an enveloping, surrounding element.

“Enys Men” translates from Cornish to “Stone Island” (a reference I believe specifically to its standing stone) and the film takes place on a small stone island off the coast of Cornwall. In Enys Men we watch a volunteer (Mary Woodvine, credited as simply "The Volunteer") alone on the island in the 1973. She tracks the growth of flowers and, gradually, becomes ensnared by her isolation, the island’s ghosts, its standing stone, its history, and hers. There’s something mystical about the island. Something mystical in the rock.

Stone’s timescale dwarfs our own. To lean on a slab of stone, to put one’s hand against its rough surface, is to be present, to feel your unique place and time. But it’s also an experience you could have had in the same location a hundred years ago. Stone’s a fitting element in a film where time collapses. Enys Men has its ghosts—sailors and miners of years' past. The island hosts an abandoned mine. The radio mentions a statue on the mainland memorializing boatmen lost at sea. And the Volunteer sees these figures on the island. She sees a girl too, whom we come to understand is her younger self. She sees a May Day celebration from years before. Characters out of different timelines all assemble on the island.

If this collapsing of time feels like a product of the Volunteer’s mind, can we blame her? Her days are all routine: walking the same routes, making the same observations, recording them carefully in the same journal, dropping stones in the same mine shaft. Such a life, in isolation, is bound to upset the clockwork progression of time. We see the ocean slowed, we see it reversed. Something is wrong with time here on Enys Men. Or, at least, it is from our perspective. On stone’s timescale, all of this—the cyclical days, the Volunteer’s past, the lives of the miners and those lost to the sea—occurs in the blink of an eye.

Stone is dead, but from a human perspective, it’s also unstable, even alive. It’s a shifting canvas for shadow and light. It projects its own moving shadows onto its surroundings. As with clouds, or Rorschach blots, we can pick out recognizable forms in its expressive shapes. Stone is solid, but for us it can be shifting, mercurial, liquid. The Volunteer finds what shroom eating visitors to Joshua Tree’s rock formations know—that a stark landscape of rock and ledge and crag provides a productive setting for psychedelic experience. Stone buttresses a general sense of instability on Enys Men, a sense that the Volunteer is losing herself.

The island interacts with the Volunteer in more direct ways too. Every day she drops a rock into the dark of an old mining shaft and it lands with the same sound (seems to land in water?). Until, one day, the noise changes. (It will eventually change back.) Elsewhere, she listens to the ground and hears a tapping sound—the sound of mining? And there’s a blurring of the island and the human. A crack in the stone of her island home recalls the line of the scar on her abdomen—a scar on which appears the same lichen that have begun to colonize her flowers. If the stone on Enys Men lives, it assimilates flesh into its designs.

Stone is sacred. In slabs of stone we can make out sacred structures—altar, obelisk, ziggurat. A jutting rock, a cliffside, a looming stone, they remind us of worshippers who’ve stood before them in the past. They bear the residue of spiritual paths we never knew. They link to an unknown uncanny, a mysticism beyond us. And we feel this on Enys Men, in a mood carried by ambient drones and by the sounds of nature. The sound of the sea especially. We feel it also in the stark geological features of Enys Men. Altars appear: in the quay before the rising enormity of island’s steep climb from the sea, and in the little ledge where the flowers grow, backed by a wall of rock. But we can’t really enumerate the sacred sites on Enys Men. On an island made of expressive stone, the potential is everywhere.

Though there is one distinct sacred site amid all the possibility on the island—the standing stone. At a late point in the film, a man shows up with supplies and asks the Volunteer, “Do you like it here on your own?” She gazes out at the standing stone and replies, “I’m not on my own.” The standing stone, or menhir, a prehistoric monolith, stands at a high point on the island, a kind of master of ceremonies for the psychic onslaught endured by the Volunteer. When she encounters ghostly children singing, we zoom in on the standing stone. Once, as she enters her house in the foreground, we see, in the background, her doppelgänger appearing from behind the standing stone. It seems at one point to disappear. And it seems, at another, to be an antagonist: during an unsettling episode, it moves location and looms right at the entrance to the house. In all the mysticism in the stone on Enys Men, the standing stone is its center.

Enys Men filmed on 16mm, and its physicality—its grain, occasional light leak, spot, or line—has a certain resonance with its setting. Stone isn’t neat or clean. It’s rough, imperfect, distinctly tactile—like the film itself. If, together with its expressive zooms, Enys Men reminds us of the films of the 70s, this is even better. Just like stone, it’s here now, very present, but also visiting us out of the past.

* There is also, we should note, a uniquely Australian significance to Hanging Rock, a site of importance to certain indigenous Australians, who were driven off it only decades before the period of the film.

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