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.
