First things first, if you haven’t seen the film, stop reading right now. I am about to spoil pretty much every major plot detail of the film.

Also, this is a hastily typed raw draft (edit:  now revised once) because I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this film for almost a week and the thought vomit just finally came out.

Many reviews have assumed that Mark Jenkin’s steadfast refusal to confirm or deny any theories implies that there is no intended meaning, but I don’t see it that way. Just because he wants yo to find your story in it doesn’t mean he didn’t have a specific story in mind when he made it, and I think I know what it is.

There is a woman we know only as The Volunteer. Sometime in the past, her teenage or very young adult years, she attempted to complete suicide by falling from a building through a glass ceiling. She was severely wounded, but survived, and was left with a very large scar on her abdomen. This tells us that she has very likely struggled with her mental health for most of her life.

Later in life, as an adult, she takes a job working and living in isolation on a small island, monitoring a small patch of rare flowers for a wildlife agency. She has been alone there for a long while, and isolation is not good for depression and such. She has an occasional visit from a supply boat with a one man crew, and over time has developed a sort of relationship with him that includes sexual activity. The exact nature of their relationship is uncertain.

After a visit from the supply man, as he returns to sea, there is a terrible storm and he radios for help. The coast guard arrives but it’s too late. His small boat has been wrecked, and he has drowned. The Volunteer is distraught at the loss of the supply man. Were they in love with each other? Was she in love with him, at least? Was she just problematically attached due to her otherwise isolated existence? Does it matter? Ultimately, the combination of her mental health struggles, her isolation, and her apparent loss of everything meaningful, drives her to complete suicide by throwing herself down an abandoned mine shaft on the island. Wait, what?

What we see in the bulk of the film is The Volunteer’s ghost in a sort of afterlife but unaware of what is going on. This is implied by numerous things. There is the standing stone atop the hill, which is likely a burial mound, and the centerpiece of The Volunteer’s routine, in many ways. She wears the exact same clothes all the time. There are the miners and the milk maids and the children, which we can ultimately infer are all other ghosts. There is a visual theme of the cycle of life with a specific focus on reclamation by the earth. There is a visual theme of archways, a classic symbol of transition/death. There is her body literally starting to grow lichen from the scar that represents her previous attempt to die. The group of seven motif serves as a sort of ethereal folklore element, a hint that this place is not natural somehow. There are multiple shots of water playing in reverse that are easy to miss but contribute to the weird. And that’s not remotely all. There are layers and layers of clues.

And that brings us to the repeated scene of rocks thrown down the mine shaft. There are a couple of notable moments where The Volunteer stands precariously close to the edge. The routine we see The Volunteer carry out is her ghost reliving her last few days of life and trying to reckon with the fact of her own death. And that death is represented by her throwing a rock down the shaft, a stand-in for her body, after which she always immediately returns to the standing stone, the symbol of death. The date in her observation log where she notes “lichen has appeared on the flower” is likely the day the supply man died, and the last entry is the day she died.

One might think at first that the supernatural elements we see are some kind of active presence influencing The Volunteer’s story, like the island is a cursed place and its evil energy is destroying her life and causing people to die. I did for a while. But I don’t think we can see it from that sinister perspective. The movie has a very pagan perspective of death as part of the cycle of life, not something malevolent to be feared. This island is certainly a place of death, as evidenced by all the people we see who have died there in assorted tragic ways. But those elements aren’t showing us the cause of The Visitor’s troubles. It’s showing us the aftermath of them. The ghosts aren’t haunting her; they are her new neighbors. Weird things happen because the afterlife is a weird place to find yourself. Perhaps she is cursed to relive those last few days over and over. Maybe it’s a process of just understanding what has happened, reckoning with her own death. But The Volunteer is a ghost, and the island is her eternal (un)resting place.

So, there you have it. That’s my read on what the hell is going on in Enys Men, pun fully intended. I certainly can’t call it a smoking gun, but it’s worth noting that in an interview with The Evolution of Horror Podcast from January 2023, Jenkin tells us that he originally started developing the story idea during a family tradition where they all get together sometime around Christmas to tell ghost stories…