So, for no particular reason, last weekend was a “new movie special” in my house. A rare occurrence, to say the least. Here then are some notes on the post-2020 releases we covered.
It kicks off like Mexico’s subtlety-free answer to ‘Parasite’, as a swanky wedding party full of head-in-the-sand rich people is crashed by the feral, green paint-splattered rioters that the media has been warning everybody about for days, prompting their own security staff to also turn against them, with predictably harrowing results.
Meanwhile, the apparently well-intentioned bride-to-be is out swerving roadblocks, trying to obtain urgent medical care for the wife of a former domestic servant. Long story short, she is captured by a cartel of rogue soldiers, who are taking advantage of the new martial law regime to orchestrate their own mass kidnapping operation, based out of a disused prison building.
Rape, torture and general dehumanisation ensues, until the bride’s brother and fiancé- fresh from burying their dead after the wedding massacre - take the ransom demands to the family’s high level military-industrial connections, who proceed to close down the embarrassing rogue element within their ranks the only way they know how: by killing absolutely everyone involved, including the prisoners, and framing the poor, long-suffering working class family whom the bride was initially trying to help for her kidnap and murder. They are executed. The End.
Jesus. I perhaps should have put in a spoiler warning before the above paragraphs, but to be honest, it’s clear within the first five minutes that nothing nice is going to happen to anyone here; the remaining screen time is just an exercise in delineating the precise detail of how their lives are going to be destroyed.
Basically comprising a blandly restaged mega-mix of assorted terrible situations which have occurred in different regions of the world in recent years, liberally spiced with older visual references to the Mexican and French revolutions, Michel Franco’s film offers little thematic nuance, no glimmer of hope, no trace of human warmth - just a relentless parade of middle class nightmare fuel and craven injustice.
Normally, I’m inclined to at least give these kind of short-sharp-shock dystopian atrocity films props for their ability to shake viewers out of their complacency and so forth, but in this case… well, let’s just say, if you want to find out about the distressing consequences of the growing disparity between rich and poor or the dangerous slide toward corrupt authoritarianism across the globe, there are a wealth of documentaries and activist films out there which can give you the skinny on that. Given that you’ll emerge feeling like crap either way, I daresay they would constitute a more useful viewing experience than Franco’s rather slick and emotionally detached outburst of one-note rage.
At least he has the decency to cram it all into less than ninety minutes, but that’s still longer than I really wished to spend being battered with the “LIFE IS SHIT” stick.
Basically, what we've got here is ‘Over the Edge’ meets ‘The Thing’, shot in an Inuit fishing village just south of the Artic Circle, where a gang of bored teenage girls are forced to defend their community against body-hopping alien monsters whilst their parents are off getting drunk at a square dance.
Things are very nearly ruined by some absolutely terrible CGI animals, mixed with scarcely-much-better, “guy in a Halloween mask” level practical effects... but, given that the horror aspect of the film is soft-pedalled throughout, none of this really matters too much.
Really, the alien/monster stuff is just an excuse to get the girls into tense and scary situations, allowing their characters and relationships to morph and reshape themselves under pressure, and allowing them to use their combined ‘ancient hunting culture + modern digital teen’ style moxie to fight back against the invaders. All of which is handled just beautifully by first-time director Innuksuk and the teenage cast, and is really where the film excels.
The remote setting is an unusual and compelling one for an action/adventure story, giving us a lot of casual insight into 21st century life as experienced by indigenous peoples in Canada’s far north along the way, and all four of the central characters are just awesome. They speak and behave like real teenagers, but are also hugely likeable and super-cool - a very difficult balance to pull off, but ‘Slash/Back’ nails it 100%. (Again, I'm reminded of Jonathan Kaplan’s classic ‘Over The Edge’ (1979) in this regard.)
I guess this is more-or-less teen-friendly viewing, but its approach to the material is in no way condescending or juvenile, and it’s easy to imagine that viewers in the girls’ own age group would get a real kick out of seeing them band together to kick ass with hunting rifles and giant choppers whilst protecting their younger sublings from harm, making this a solid “family movie night” recommendation for anyone out there with kids.
Fun, heart-warming low key stuff, this certainly made for a perfect palate-cleanser after the joyless slog of ‘New Order’. I mean, if kids like this are growing up out there in the frozen North (and aspiring filmmakers presumably a mere couple of the generations older are casting them in cool movies), maybe there’s hope for the human race after all, y’know?
I haven’t seen Jenkin’s previous film ‘Bait’, but I became interested in checking this one out after reading that he still shoots using a 16mm bolex without sync sound, processing the resulting footage in his kitchen sink and single-handedly foleying the entire soundtrack - a statement of DIY intent which I find both appealing and intriguing, given that I’m sure he could have easily wrangled professional level production values off the back of his first film’s success, had he wished to.
And indeed, this notion of filmmaking reinvented as a kind of rural handicraft can be strongly felt throughout ‘Enys Men’, with the director’s focus often seeming to dwell less on the elliptical tale of a woman (Jenkin’s partner Mary Woodvine) residing alone on a fictional Cornish island observing a copse of rare flowers (in 1973, natch), and more on the windswept vistas of the oppressive, rocky coastline, or the richly textured detail Jenkin wrings out of the man-made elements within the frame. (His obsessive concentration on radio apparatus, petrol generators, kettles and the like suggests a sense of bone-deep analogue fetishism which I suspect it will be difficult for any of us pre-digital relics to fully begrudge.)
All of this looks absolutely beautiful, needless to say, rendered uncanny and weirdly subjective by heavy layers of grain, flashes of over-saturation and other assorted artefacts of Jenkins’ determinedly lo-fi technique, whilst the director’s own score - seemingly conjured up from a bunch of found sounds and radio static filtered through some pedals - furthers the homemade vibe.
I also enjoyed the way in which Jenkin maps out the topography of his imaginary island using carefully framed bits of mainland - a process which put me in mind of certain ‘70s Jess Franco films - whilst the film’s ominous use of abandoned mine workings allowed me to loosely place it within the canon of earlier “Cornish horror”, alongside Doctor Blood’s Coffin, ‘Plague of the Zombies’ and Mike Raven's ‘Crucible of Terror’, which pleased me no end.
Not that there’s a great deal of explicit horror stuff here, it must be said… or indeed much in the way of a clearly delineated series of events at all, really. Though the film is densely packed with images and movement (the inability of the bolex to extend shots beyond thirty seconds probably helps in that regard), the narrative information we are given eventually becomes so oblique, contradictory and chronologically disjointed that each viewer will probably emerge with their own interpretation of exactly what the hell is going on here… which is probably just as it should be.
In fact, ‘Enys Men’ fulfils its function as a kind of ‘mystery film’ with a rare intelligence and lack of pretention, allowing images and sounds to function like pieces of a cursed jigsaw puzzle, never quite fitting together into a satisfying, coherent whole, but suggesting a wealth of strange and intriguing patterns along the way.
As such, I suspect many viewers lured in by the hype surrounding the film’s release will find themselves left cold and irritated by the whole experience, and I certainly wouldn't blame them for that. It’s not exactly what you’d call a ‘film for everyone’, that’s for sure.
Personally speaking though, whilst it didn’t have a huge emotional impact on me, I still really enjoyed it on a meditative/aesthetic level, simply because the stuff it’s made out of (grainy 16mm footage of craggy headlands, deconstructed fragments of M.R. James-esque ghost stories, eerie coastal ruins, retro-‘70s lo-fi experimentalism) always really appeals to me. After all, I’m only a few years younger than Jenkin, I grew up in a broadly similar environment, and I suspect that some of the same bone-deep connection he clearly feels to this material must carry over to some extent. Your own ability to tune into the same wavelength may vary, but that’s just fine.
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