Before the song has finished, I suspect that it won’t be long before I’ll want to see Enys Men again too. There’s also a flashforward on the soundtrack as a radio announcer refers retrospectively to something which happened on 1 May 1973, when we know from the Volunteer’s logbook that we are in April of that year.

Young points out that the year when Enys Men is set, 1973, was a significant one for British horror, seeing the release of The Wicker Man and Don’t Look Now (on a double bill) and The Stone Tape had been broadcast on the previous Christmas Day. The pace here is slow and dialogue is minimal – with much of it coming via her limited interactions on a battered VHF metal maritime radio. A wildlife volunteer on an uninhabited island off the British coast descends into a terrifying madness that challenges her grip on reality and pushes her into a living nightmare.Enys Men will be available on Dual Format Edition (Blu-ray, DVD) and BFI Player Subscription Exclusive release on 8th May.

Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH). In the BFI season he curated, of some of the influences on Enys Men (its DNA, as he put it), Jenkin showed Roeg’s first solo feature, Walkabout, which was the first Roeg film he ever saw, possibly because it was the only one of Roeg’s great run in the 1970s and first half of the 1980s which wasn’t adults-only. As May Day, the anniversary of a local lifeboat disaster, approaches, changes begin to happen in the flowers. It was shot in 16mm, and it has a wonderfully desolate look that really pushes forward the sense of isolation for the island, using the Cornish landscape exquisitely. On an island off the Cornish coast, a woman (Mary Woodvine), not named and listed in the credits as The Volunteer, is alone, there to monitor some unusual flowers growing there.For items that are dispatched using our standard service, we ask that you wait 14 days from the date of dispatch before reporting any items as undelivered. Wood compares Jenkin to Roeg in several ways: as a director who is also his own cinematographer (as was Roeg on his first two films, after his previous career as a leading DP of the 1960s), in their use of editing to fragment time and space, and their use of landscape. Those similarities are considerable – after just these two features, it’s hard to mistake Jenkin’s work for anyone else’s – but they do end. Zavvi - The Home of Pop CultureFrom visionary filmmaker Mark Jenkin, the Bafta award-winning director of Bait. Fowler pays attention to the film’s editing and its effects on its use of time and place, and its use of a female protagonist “[watching] herself being looked at” and “[looking] at herself being watched”.

People – a man, a young woman, some girls singing (the Cornish-language song “Kan Me”, which is also performed by its composer, Gwenno, during the end credits) – appear without warning. Extras on this BFI dual-format release include a Children’s Film Foundation film, Haunters of the Deep (1984), sharing West Cornwall locations and a haunted tin mine with Enys Men, and The Duchy of Cornwall (1938), a travel short evoking the county’s Mediterranean forebears, storm-lashed iron coast, wrestling rituals, tin mines and tourists. The otherwise nameless volunteer (Mary Woodvine) meanwhile lives alone on an island in ‘73, recording a rare flower’s daily condition, with the radio and a boatman’s supplies her only mainland contact.Jenkin mentions in the disc extra that his original idea was to mix the film in mono (which would have been period-appropriate for 1973) but thought that was too thin. The eerie ethno-mysticism of Jenkin influences The Shout (1978), The Last Wave (1977) and Walkabout (1971) also lie in Enys Men’s unquiet soil, where the films’ Aboriginal earth-magic becomes Cornish. Then there’s the amazingly creepy score, composed by Jenkin himself, along with the appearance of folk tunes, which are often just eerie enough by themselves. Folk horror is a genre that has become ever more popular in recent times, after originally being established in the 1970s with films like The Wicker Man and Blood on Satan’s Claw. That folk horror comes from the film’s, and its maker’s Cornish heritage, a part of the country with its own ancient language and almost an island with the river Tamar not quite cutting it off from the rest of the English mainland.