Deep Is the Well: On Mark Jenkin’s “Enys Men” and a Cinema of Absence

What does the silver screen screen? It screens me from the world it holds—that is, makes me invisible. And it screens that world from me—that is, screens its existence from me.
—Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed (1971)

EVEN THOSE who’ve never seen Lost in Translation (2003) likely know the final scene’s lingering question: What does Bill Murray whisper into Scarlett Johansson’s ear? Because the unheard speech has become a pop culture joke—“I bet it was just right,” muses Cleveland in Family Guy—it’s easy to forget how strange it is: in a film far more about connection than ambiguity, Sofia Coppola redacts the most important words her character has to say.

Such moments raise a deceptively simple set of questions: How does one approach films that do not provide crucial information? What happens when “essential” elements are concealed or perhaps don’t even exist within a particular film’s framework? These questions underpin what I call a “cinema of absence.” By conspicuously withholding a sound, an image, or both, a director can provoke viewers to consider the very boundaries of the filmic medium, to put something of themselves into a work that doesn’t provide everything.

Absence has already found its way to film studies. Take Justin Remes’s Absence in Cinema: The Art of Showing Nothing (Columbia University Press, 2020). Though he also focuses on aural and visual absences, Remes centralizes those of avant-garde artists (Stan Brakhage, Naomi Uman) with occasional references to mainstream examples (Charlie Chaplin, David Lynch). Here, I’ll take the opposite approach, centralizing films that fall into—to varying degrees—the tradition of Classical Hollywood cinema. Despite their art-house leanings, the examples studied herein rely on characters with discrete personalities, narratives that present and resolve a crisis, etc.

In the spirit of nothingness, allow me to define cinematic absence by identifying what it is not. Firstly, it is not synonymous with the inexplicable. When The Shining’s Wendy Torrance (Shelley Duvall), in the throes of hysteria, encounters someone in a bear costume going down on a tuxedoed man, she is properly confused (as are we). As baffling as it is, though, this infamous scene from the 1980 film does not withhold aural or visual information. (If anything, it’s more than we asked or expected to see.) We see the characters and understand the action; it’s all right there. If, on the other hand, Stanley Kubrick was to show these ghostly characters talking but mute or distort their words—or, if he was to visually exclude one of them from the frame—then these moments could be deemed proper cinematic absences. They are specific to the medium itself; one can’t, after all, “mute” a painting.

Secondly, cinematic absence does not refer to literally any possible thing not seen or heard on the screen, but, rather, things conspicuously missing that the viewer might search for and expect. In Absence and Nothing: The Philosophy of What There Is Not (Oxford University Press, 2021), Stephen Mumford taps into this distinction when he describes a hypothetical road trip that didn’t result in a flat tire: “I was also not car-jacked, not hit by an elk, nor a nuclear bomb, I didn’t write a novel while travelling, no one spoke to me about Simone de Beauvoir, and so on.” Although all these events are equally nonexistent (and Mumford goes to great lengths to prove this claim), the flat tire feels more salient than the others. Because they concern what is or is not relevant, narratively speaking, such absences align with mainstream cinema’s literary roots.

Let’s consider another scene from The Shining. Late in the film, an unseen entity unlocks the pantry where Wendy has trapped her crazed husband, Jack (Jack Nicholson). All explanations (a deranged interloper, a ghost, Wendy herself, a telekinetic Jack) are equally possible in that they’re equally absent; after all, Kubrick withholds any visual information (we only hear a voice—that of Delbert Grady, the Overlook Hotel’s previous caretaker—so the sound’s true source remains unclear). The latter hypotheticals, however, corroborate the film’s ambiguous differentiation between the imagined and the real, the supernatural and the psychological. Within a film’s constructed world, its various nothings must mean—or at least suggest—something.

I want to focus on road trips without flat tires; those without nuclear holocaust are inconsequential.

Categorizing certain nothings as something and others as, well, nothing may smack of quixotic mental gymnastics, but the recent outpour of philosophical books on the topic—popular and academic alike—suggests otherwise. “[A] philosophy of ‘negativism’ is currently prevalent,” Mumford tells us. “It is virtually conventional wisdom.” Today’s deep thinkers have much to say about nothing. In 2022 alone, Oxford University Press released two books on the subject: Mumford’s along with Roy Sorensen’s Nothing: A Philosophical History. Meanwhile, other publishers are looking beyond the Occidental world. In May of this year, Polity released the first English translation of South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s Absence: On the Culture and Philosophy of the Far East—their 12th Han book (a 13th from the prolific writer is already on the way).

Mumford’s and Han’s texts are both impassioned responses to prevailing—in their opinions, incomplete—philosophical trends. Though filled with dense logical postulations, Mumford’s primary message can be distilled to the following: “[T]here is no nothing. There is only what-is.” He pushes back against now-dominant notions of negativism by adopting what he calls a “soft Parmenideanism,” one that denies the existence of “negative existents” but discards “the more hardline views of Parmenides: such as that motion and change are not real.”

Han’s text is more accessible. At barely 100 pages, translated from German by Daniel Steuer, Absence benefits from a crisp prose style and far-reaching scope, with subtopics including eating utensils, architecture, and bowing customs. He shines a light on Far Eastern approaches to absence that Western philosophical theories continue to ignore; the fact that he lives and writes in Germany may account for some of the urgency with which he interrogates Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Hegel, among others. Mumford’s text offers depth, Han’s breadth. Together, they illustrate the theoretically and culturally diverse means by which we can assess nothing.

Dovetailing with this philosophical trend is a shift in contemporary mainstream films away from the presence of ghostly entities and the convoluted lore surrounding them, and toward absences. Take Kyle Edward Ball’s surprise art-house smash Skinamarink (2022), which never clearly shows its human characters’ faces (or whole bodies, for that matter), let alone that of the malevolent force terrorizing their house. Ball also distorts the characters’ dialogue to such an extent that subtitles are required (and provided) throughout. Or Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid (2023), whose detail-packed mise-en-scène distracts viewers from noticing how much we don’t learn of the titular antihero: what he does for a living, where exactly he lives, what his life before middle age—beyond flashbacks to a short window of time from his childhood—was like. For all we know, he’s been sitting in his cramped apartment staring at the wall for the past 30-odd years.

Why are audiences now so preoccupied with, and primed for, cinematic absence? Perhaps it has something to do with the crossover popularity of art-house production companies like A24 and Neon, whose output emphasizes ambiguity and aesthetic experimentation. Or maybe it taps into a shared existential angst, a desire to escape our media-saturated lives by way of entering diegetic worlds “desaturated” to the essentials, then even less than that. Whatever the answer—surely, it cannot be distilled to any single explanation—it’s clear that things left unseen, unheard, or inaccessible are becoming the new roots of cinematic terror, a terror that transcends genre and taps into the very nature of the medium.

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Perhaps most emblematic of this shift is Mark Jenkin’s 2022 tone poem Enys Men, about a woman whose painstakingly structured, isolated work on an island gives way to insanity. Jenkin’s sophomore feature is not one of plot but of pattern, not of explicit characterization but of oblique psychological portraiture. As such, it is an ideal case study for today’s cinema of absence.

The central image of Enys Men—one to which the director returns no fewer than five times—is an overhead shot of a rock falling down a well. In each of the shot’s iterations, we do not see the person dropping the rock (preceding images, however, show her outstretched hand): an unnamed woman (Mary Woodvine) referred to only as “The Volunteer” in the end credits. (None of the characters are named, in fact: an absence analogous with Jenkin’s rejection of traditional narrative structure). Her sole purpose at this remote outpost is to keep careful watch over a cluster of flowers growing on a cliff edge. This childlike ritual at the well is part of her strict daily routine, which also includes measuring the flowers, walking past a monolithic boulder on the way to her cottage, starting the pull-cord generator that supplies her modest electricity use, making some tea, logging the flowers’ measurements, and—finally—reading in bed by candlelight. The precision with which she executes these tasks underlines their futility, their inability to stave off the powerful abyss encircling her.

She seems perfectly content in these early scenes, a little smile gracing her lips as she quietly goes about her business. “Are you lonely?” a radio dispatcher asks her. “Not really,” she responds. This exchange, the first instance of dialogue, occurs nearly 15 minutes into the film. Human speech, in Enys Men, is a sporadic presence at best.

However, Jenkin’s aesthetic approach—one that depends on an often-disorienting rift between sound and image—suggests something is off. We hear things but don’t see them (the rock splashing in water at the bottom of the well; an ominous rumbling under the flowers), see things but don’t hear them (a rescue boat speeding away), and, sometimes, see and hear things that shouldn’t go together (faint sounds of shattered glass accompanying a gull’s dive into the ocean). Because the narrative consists of little more than increasingly strange variations in the aforementioned routine, these audiovisual juxtapositions generate the film’s dramatic weight.

Enys Men doesn’t tell a story—the closest we get to one are allusions to a loved one’s watery death—as much as it follows our protagonist’s futile attempts to impose order on the natural world. As elements of this world disappear, so too does her sense of place, time, and—ultimately—even self.

What begins as seemingly innocuous ruptures in the Volunteer’s routine—the generator dies, she runs out of petrol and tea, lichen starts growing on the flowers—culminates with parts of her routine vanishing entirely. “The flowers have gone,” she writes in what will be the final entry of her daily log. She’s not speaking euphemistically. The flowers haven’t died or been torn out. One morning, they’re simply gone. Later, the gigantic boulder outside of her cottage vanishes. In the last scene, the Volunteer herself disappears. None of these three disappearances are “explained” to the viewer. We don’t see the flowers, stone, or woman slowly fade away or float off into the ether via special effects. By the same token, we don’t hear anything—a supernatural whooshing sound, for instance—that might suggest what becomes of them. In one shot, they’re there; in another, they’re not. That’s it.

Whether we see this ending as despairing or transcendent depends on whether we interpret it through a Western or Eastern lens, with the help of Mumford or of Han. (Either way, the title of the tattered paperback we often see her reading, A Blueprint for Survival, assumes ironic connotations). In the beginning, the Volunteer’s adherence to routine—to doing—aligns with what Han describes as Kant’s Western belief that “[o]nly a life that is filled with goal-directed actions is a happy and satisfying life. Sense is goal. Being is doing.” Her log entries assume a metonymic role. As if to underline her (false) sense of stability through regimentation, they’re identical for much of the film’s runtime. Each date is followed by the temperature (always between 14.2 and 14.5 degrees Celsius) and a short annotation: “No change.”

But nature cannot be contained, nor its development arrested, as the increasingly dramatic changes to the flowers suggest. “Lichen has appeared on one of the flowers,” the Volunteer documents. “The lichen has grown on the flower.” “The lichen has spread to all of the flowers.” And, finally, “The flowers have gone.” With the Volunteer’s purpose annihilated, so too is she extinguished. Disruptions to the pattern reveal the nothingness at the core of her existence, a nothingness exacerbated by the film’s visual and aural absences.

If we look to the Far East, as Han does, this ending may be cast in an altogether different light. Informed by the ancient Daoist Zhuangzi, Han describes “one [who] lets the world happen, lets oneself be filled with it by retreating into an absence, by being oblivious of self or by emptying oneself.” By discarding her “No change” entries, the Volunteer “lets the world happen” and, as a result, retreats “into an absence.” In this case, absence and emptiness are strengths, indicators of doffing futile goals in favor of allowing existence to continue on its own terms, unbothered and unmeasured. It’s worth noting that after the Volunteer disappears, the boulder reappears, as if it’s allowed to be itself once more.

Also telling are the changes to the protagonist’s log. Our last glimpse of it reveals an interesting twist: “No change” is now written in the date column, and the temperature and observations columns are blank. As Han explains, “Someone who does not reside in the world, and instead unbounds and expands himself to encompass the world, does not know of any hither and thither, up and down.” This new logging method suggests that the Volunteer no longer sees any yesterday, today, or tomorrow. There is no pattern. Disappearance is transcendence.

Both Mumford and Han dedicate sections of their texts to artistic representations of nothing. The former places art under the umbrella of “fictionalism,” a characteristic of which is “that the unactualized possibilities are mere fictions, which have no real being at all.” Could we surmise, by this logic, that all filmic plots and characters are absences in and of themselves? When analyzing Noh theater, the latter identifies an atmosphere of “dream-like hovering,” emphasizing narratives in which “[t]hings appear, only to disappear into absence again,” which sounds uncannily like Jenkin’s narrative techniques. Since absence and its many paradoxical effects continue to preoccupy the human mind, it’s only natural to see cinema think through these same phenomena.

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During one of her daily visits to the well, the Volunteer doesn’t hear a splash when she drops a rock into it. Frantic, she throws stone after stone down the pitch-black hole—to no avail. As in many great films, this moment is suffused with ambiguity. Are the stones falling indefinitely? Are they somehow vanishing from the physical world? Or are we just witnessing a character’s deluded sense of time and place? The overhead-angled shot puts us in the Volunteer’s shoes. We, too, peer into the darkness and wonder: What do we (not) see? What do we (not) hear?

This is what a cinema of absence can do. By withholding, it pulls us in. It demands our presence.

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Thomas M. Puhr’s book Fate in Film: A Deterministic Approach to Cinema is available from Wallflower Press.