When I first watched Bait, the filmmaker was an unknown phenomenon, a man making film out of ingenuity, will power and an imagistic imagination to die for. Now I am only one step removed from the same director, knowing several of the luminaries in the credits. His story is inspirational, with Enys Men premiering in Cannes and breaking out of the low-fi bubble. As Mr P observed, there are posters for the film in Oxford Circus tube station. Given all this there is the nagging fear that the film will underwhelm, that it will have lost the marriage of DIY aesthetic and stop motion narrative that made Bait one of the most remarkable films of the British century. I should not have feared. Enys Men takes a gothic turn, but retains all the wonder of its predecessor. It has elements of folk horror, but it also has elements of early Buñuel. The marriage in cinema between object as both aesthetic and semiotic signifier is once again beautifully explored and constructed. The word is secondary, far more so than in Bait, and the language is constructed from image, allowing the film to hover between dream and the perceived reality of its unnamed heroine. Cornwall’s burnished tones are interrupted by a gallo scarlet, and the effect is hypnotic and delirious.
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