Enys Men (2023)
A woman in a bright red coat walks the barren landscape of an island somewhere off the coast of Cornwall. She’s a volunteer monitoring wildlife, in particular a clutch of white flowers of which she records the soil temperature at their roots every day.
It’s a life of strict routine—measure the soil temperature, drop a stone in the shaft of an old tin mine, make a cup of tea, record the details in a notebook. She’s alone, but she talks to a girl who she sometimes sees standing on the shed roof, and the old stone that stands against the horizon is sometimes closer than it should be, and there are children, women, miners in her dreams.
The landscape seems to press closer, and it begins to feel like the island is part of her, and time is playing tricks. A visiting boatman with supplies wears a yellow raincoat that she’s previously found washed up on the rocks. The radio speaks of the anniversary of an accident fifty years before, but the date is in the future of her written temperature log. The mystery mostly resolves itself but not completely, which is just the way I like it.