Cut off from the main: how films about islands reflect our anxious, divided times | Film

If cinema is anything to go by, it stands to reason that the further a place is from the regular thrum of civilisation, the more obscure everything becomes. The spiritual world feels closer, and supernatural phenomena more likely if nobody is around to interfere. And when there are fewer distractions to contend with, memories are replayed, minds wander, dreams contort into reality.

This, no doubt, is part of the reason why Mark Jenkin’s latest film Enys Men sees him venture offshore to a largely uninhabited island whose only resident is an unnamed volunteer (Mary Woodvine) tasked with monitoring the local plant life. Her routine becomes embellished with rituals of her own, like dropping a stone down a disused mine shaft, driven seemingly by metaphysical forces rather than any practical objective.

Stripped of interaction with the outside world, the volunteer’s existence follows a relentlessly repetitive rhythm. The exact details of her daily cycle shift as the film inches by, but the routine still provides the backbone to the movie.

The time warp of an island creates rhythms in other ways. The Banshees of Inisherin, set on a fictional island off the Irish coast, follows the ruptured friendship between Colm (Brendan Gleeson) and Pádraic (Colin Farrell) against the backdrop of the Irish civil war in 1923. The breakdown of their relationship escalates with each visit to the local pub, the story only moving along as 2pm rings in each day.

Islands, of course, have long been instrumental in heightening the sense of danger intrinsic to horror storytelling. When David Pinner’s 1967 novel Ritual was translated into The Wicker Man, the story’s location was changed from a mainland Cornish village to the fictional Scottish island of Summerisle. Horrors and crime narratives can flourish on islands because, with so few people around, potential enemies are everywhere and safety is nowhere. In both Rian Johnson’s whodunnit Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery and cheffy horror The Menu, island locations are not only markers of extreme wealth but also crucial plot devices that force characters to look constantly over their shoulder. On Inisherin, even friends can become foes overnight.

The logistical difficulties of an isolated existence provide an ideal framework for the psychological unravelling that horrors and thrillers often rely upon. On an island, time is slippery, communication ineffective. The patchy radio signal in Enys Men disrupts the volunteer’s connection to mainland civilisation, to the point that dialogue is virtually absent from the film. Other characters are only introduced through fragmentary glimpses of the island’s history, real or imagined, as though the once dormant land has reclaimed its voice in the conversation.

It’s hard to divorce these stories from other defining issues of recent years. Had Enys Men and The Banshees of Inisherin been made before Covid-19, they might not have been met with quite as much empathy by audiences, who have now endured a near-universal period of isolation for themselves. Simply put: the pandemic made an island out of every home. The same has happened on a macro scale against a backdrop of deepening sociopolitical divides, where societies and entire countries are intent on putting water between themselves and the perceived “other side”.

In the Banshees of Inisherin, the island’s disconnection from the mainland becomes a metaphor for the broken communication within the community itself. “No man is an island,” reads John Donne’s famous line, but some will try to make themselves so. Like a poor radio signal, Colm lacks the vocabulary to articulate his despair. Meanwhile his preoccupation with being remembered, if not for his musical gift then for the seriousness with which he supposedly takes it, sees him drive people away. An island may seem removed from the rest of society – in this case the civil war, which Colm and Pádraic observe from the relative safety of Inisherin’s beach – but the anxieties of the human condition cannot be kept at bay forever.

If cinema is anything to go by, it stands to reason that the further a place is from the regular thrum of civilisation, the more obscure everything becomes. The spiritual world feels closer, and supernatural phenomena more likely if nobody is around to interfere. And when there are fewer distractions to contend with, memories are replayed, minds wander, dreams contort into reality.

This, no doubt, is part of the reason why Mark Jenkin’s latest film Enys Men sees him venture offshore to a largely uninhabited island whose only resident is an unnamed volunteer (Mary Woodvine) tasked with monitoring the local plant life. Her routine becomes embellished with rituals of her own, like dropping a stone down a disused mine shaft, driven seemingly by metaphysical forces rather than any practical objective.

Stripped of interaction with the outside world, the volunteer’s existence follows a relentlessly repetitive rhythm. The exact details of her daily cycle shift as the film inches by, but the routine still provides the backbone to the movie.

The time warp of an island creates rhythms in other ways. The Banshees of Inisherin, set on a fictional island off the Irish coast, follows the ruptured friendship between Colm (Brendan Gleeson) and Pádraic (Colin Farrell) against the backdrop of the Irish civil war in 1923. The breakdown of their relationship escalates with each visit to the local pub, the story only moving along as 2pm rings in each day.

Islands, of course, have long been instrumental in heightening the sense of danger intrinsic to horror storytelling. When David Pinner’s 1967 novel Ritual was translated into The Wicker Man, the story’s location was changed from a mainland Cornish village to the fictional Scottish island of Summerisle. Horrors and crime narratives can flourish on islands because, with so few people around, potential enemies are everywhere and safety is nowhere. In both Rian Johnson’s whodunnit Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery and cheffy horror The Menu, island locations are not only markers of extreme wealth but also crucial plot devices that force characters to look constantly over their shoulder. On Inisherin, even friends can become foes overnight.

The logistical difficulties of an isolated existence provide an ideal framework for the psychological unravelling that horrors and thrillers often rely upon. On an island, time is slippery, communication ineffective. The patchy radio signal in Enys Men disrupts the volunteer’s connection to mainland civilisation, to the point that dialogue is virtually absent from the film. Other characters are only introduced through fragmentary glimpses of the island’s history, real or imagined, as though the once dormant land has reclaimed its voice in the conversation.

It’s hard to divorce these stories from other defining issues of recent years. Had Enys Men and The Banshees of Inisherin been made before Covid-19, they might not have been met with quite as much empathy by audiences, who have now endured a near-universal period of isolation for themselves. Simply put: the pandemic made an island out of every home. The same has happened on a macro scale against a backdrop of deepening sociopolitical divides, where societies and entire countries are intent on putting water between themselves and the perceived “other side”.

In the Banshees of Inisherin, the island’s disconnection from the mainland becomes a metaphor for the broken communication within the community itself. “No man is an island,” reads John Donne’s famous line, but some will try to make themselves so. Like a poor radio signal, Colm lacks the vocabulary to articulate his despair. Meanwhile his preoccupation with being remembered, if not for his musical gift then for the seriousness with which he supposedly takes it, sees him drive people away. An island may seem removed from the rest of society – in this case the civil war, which Colm and Pádraic observe from the relative safety of Inisherin’s beach – but the anxieties of the human condition cannot be kept at bay forever.