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Perched on the cliff of a windswept island off the coast of Cornwall is a shock of white flowers. Every day a woman studies their petals in religious silence before heading home and jotting notes in a diary. Date. Daily temperature. Observations. The year is 1973, the month April, and that’s about as much contextual information Mark Jenkin’s sinuous, entrancing Enys Men parcels out. We don’t know who the woman is, what or who those notes are for, when she got to the island, when she’ll leave. Penned by Jenkin, its script credits her as “The Volunteer,” whose daily pilgrimages to the cliff feel like a vocation, an act of faith.

Brimming with all manner of visions, Enys Men maintains this otherworldly tone throughout. Pegging it as a folk horror feels both apt and somewhat restrictive. The dread Jenkin conjures does not need scars or thrills to...

Notebook is covering the Cannes Film Festival with an ongoing correspondence between critics Leonardo Goi and Lawrence Garcia, and editor Daniel Kasman.Enys Men.Dear Danny and Lawrence,I can’t believe we’re halfway through the circus already. Time has a way of slipping out of bounds when one’s in Cannes: it’s been six days since we landed here, though in my currently starved and sleep-deprived state, that feels like a whole month already. I’m spending my Saturday night typing away in a semi-deserted press room, while you two must be currently queuing for Cristian Mungiu’s R.M.N. I’d have loved to join you—and I look forward to hearing your impressions in your next dispatches—but I felt as though I needed a break to sort out my thoughts on three titles I’ve caught earlier this week and have been mulling over here since.

The moment a group of Cornish fishermen and lifeboatmen turned their charitable crooning on the shore of Port Isaac into a Universal Music record deal that saw them debut in the top ten was the moment producers started falling over themselves to sign the life rights for a cinematic adaptation. And just as the band subsequently released another two collections of sea shanties and traditional folk songs despite their original one-album contract, it appears that Chris Foggin’s feel-good dramedy will soon receive its own sequel. I guess that’s the power of Fisherman’s Friends and their inspiring bond steeped in history, work ethic, family, and friendship. They’re a band that’s as easy to underestimate as they are to champion once they’ve proven you wrong because the music doesn’t lie.

That doesn’t, however, mean that screenwriters Piers Ashworth, Meg Leonard, and Nick Moorcroft had a...