Even a little star power can’t temper the vision of one of Britain’s most original filmmakers. With Rose of Nevada, as with Bait (2019) and Enys Men (2022) before it, Mark Jenkin has crafted a 16mm gem with his wind-up Bolex camera, capturing the faces, sounds, and textures of the Cornish coast. He makes you feel the percussive thud of the ocean, the rough scrape of a rusted chain, the delicate carpet of lichen and wildflowers.
And it’s all in a way that feels so thrillingly at odds with how cinema normally treats these rare and increasingly fetishised celluloid mediums. A Jenkin film doesn’t trade in cherished, heady nostalgia. It’s beautiful, but it feels uneasy and violent. In fact, very few others make you feel the fragility of the film strip more, the sense that at any moment the thing might tear and the story might be lost forever.
Yet Rose of Nevada effortlessly blends in the familiar faces of both George MacKay, star of 1917 (2019), and Callum Turner, our potential future Bond. They, too, become another texture among textures, committing themselves fully to Jenkin’s quasi-ghost story about a quasi-phantom industry. They are Nick and Liam, young men hired by a local fisherman (Jenkin regular Edward Rowe), alongside a grizzled captain (Francis Magee), to work the Rose of Nevada.
The boat reappeared, without explanation, after having been missing for three decades, its crew presumed lost to a deadly storm. When Nick and Liam sail out and back for the first catch, they return to a village marked not by its closed shutters, community food bank, and general sense of hollowness, but by a bustling pub and a community expectant and dependent on their work. All of them, including the widowed Tina (an excellent Rosalind Eleazar, who lets her grief get comfortable), are convinced that Nick and Liam are actually the previous crew.
A newspaper left on a mantelpiece reveals the truth: they’re back in 1993, and somehow they’ve either taken the place of, transformed into, or, in some way, have always been these dead fishermen. Liam slinks unquestioningly into his new role as husband and father, while Nick resists, knowing he has his own young family waiting forward in time with a leaking roof he can’t afford to fix. Nick holds on tighter to his present, his identity, his name. To Liam, it “doesn’t matter no more”. Both MacKay and Turner handle gracefully that question of self-obliteration.
Rose of Nevada is Jenkin’s most conventional narrative film so far, which is to say it’s still filled to the brim with dreams, visions, and ambiguities. It’s a Cornish The Great Gatsby, in its own mesmeric way, though its boat bearing us back ceaselessly into the past is a literal one. Is the past a retrievable place? Even if that past, for Nick and Liam, is one they weren’t even alive for? How much are they still bound to a community they can no longer benefit from? History, for them, is both burden and seduction, and Jenkin seamlessly merges his timelines into one united poem of bright shades, sharp textures, and a crunchy soundscape added entirely in post-production. He makes films you can’t help but feel a part of.
Dir: Mark Jenkin. Starring: George MacKay, Callum Turner, Rosalind Eleazar, Francis Magee, Mary Woodvine. Cert 15, 114 minutes.
‘Rose of Nevada’ is in cinemas from 24 April
