Tea-Based Horror

This is more like it: Enys Men (2022). I've been watching a fair number of old classics or modern blockbusters. Then I go to the library, pick a random movie with a mysterious description that seems to be horror-adjacent, and get this. 

It is set on an uninhabited island off the coast of Cornwall in the 70s. Mary Woodvine is an ordinary woman of 50 or so, volunteering to monitor a some rare flowers. Every day she goes to a patch of these flowers and measures the soil temperature. She also drops a stone down a small mine shaft. Then she goes back to a small house and records her findings: date, soil temp, and "No changes". 

This routine is shot almost abstractly. with her body framed oddly, intercut with the wild and dangerous sea on the rocks around the island. And there are flashes of a young woman, a preacher, a group of miners, a rescue boat crew, some dancing schoolgirls. We see the memorial for the crew, and wonder if these are ghosts.

One day, she notes lichen growing on one of the flowers and puts that in her log - not mentioning that it also seems to be growing on her belly, on a scar (C-section scar?).

Also, there is a standing stone pillar on the hill opposite her house, with a local legend that we didn't catch because it was related over the CB radio and was too distorted to understand. Probably satanic.

That's about it. She runs a generator for lights and cooking, and gets a delivery of petrol from a man she might have had an affair with (but they are pretty uncomfortable together). She tells someone om the CB that nothing is going on, except she's running out of tea. She takes a bath and reads the ecological paperback A Blueprint for Survival. She talks on the CB, or ignores it if she's busy.

So there's very little horror - except for the possible tea shortage. There are ghosts, some of them maybe hers. The young woman may have been Woodvine's daughter, and may have killed herself. She sees one of the miners living in her house, reading Blueprint on the toilet. But it's mostly a meditation on nature, isolation, the past, and so forth. It's beautiful and strange, although more disquieting than terrifying. 

By the way, there are no men belonging to Eny or Enys. Enys Men is Cornish for Stone Island, the island this takes place on. This was a COVID film, with director Mark Jenkin shooting on 16mm film with a small crew. Good choice for lockdown.