[FILM]
ENYS MEN
The Volunteer (Mary Woodvine), seriously hard at work.
★★★★ OUT 13 JANUARY / CERT 15 96 MINS
DIRECTOR Mark Jenkin
CAST Mary Woodvine, Edward Rowe, Flo Crowe
PLOT 1973, Cornwall. A volunteer (Woodvine) stays on an uninhabited island off the coast, making daily observations of a rare flower. When her regular routine begins to be disrupted, dreams — or nightmares — begin to bleed into real life, and reality itself becomes foggy.
MARK JENKIN IS a filmmaking force. The Cornish writer-director has, since 2002, cultivated a unique style of experimental, hand-cranked short films, all of which culminated in the BAFTA-award-winning 2019 feature Bait: a stupendous black-and-white drama about gentrification tensions in a Cornish fishing village. Playing with cinematic grammar while staying firmly in his West Country backyard, Jenkin managed to create something that seemed both plucked from the past and thrillingly new — atrick he has now repeated with his latest film.