Maverick British indie auteur Mark Jenkin takes his singular lo-fi style deep into the Twilight Zone in this off-beat maritime mystery. Rose of Nevada is once again set in Jenkin’s native Cornwall in the wild west of England, a ruggedly beautiful coastal region famous for its pretty fishing villages, but with widespread rural poverty lurking just below the surface. Premiering in Venice this week, this cryptic time-bending thriller will mostly have niche art-house appeal, but its genre-adjacent plot and semi-famous cast should help Jenkin gain a little more traction with mainstream audiences and distributors.
If Jenkin’s breakthrough film Bait (2019) was a social-realist drama clothed in striking monochrome visuals, and Enys Men (2022) a psychedelic fever dream that reworked real Cornish-Celtic folklore into delirious folk horror, then Rose of Nevada plays more like a classic spooky sea shanty with its ancient mariners, tragic shipwrecks and haunted ghost vessels. It is also arguably more conventional and less experimental than both its predecessors, with a paranormal plot that creaks a little in places. At times it feels like watching an authentically clunky television thriller from the 1970s, rather than a 21st century movie that plays with that retro visual grammar in a knowingly post-modern way.
Alongside his regular chorus of non-professionals and Cornish locals, Jenkin is working here with more established actors for the first time, George MacKay (1917, The Beast) and up-and-coming star Callum Turner (Masters of the Air, The Boys in the Boat). Even so, the director makes no obvious concessions to his stars, who meet him more than halfway in adapting to his arch, mannered, non-naturalistic style.
Working with deliberately degraded 16mm film, overdubbed dialogue and nerve-jangling sound design, Jenkin is once again in charge of the entire audiovisual toolbox. His forensic focus is evident right from the opening panorama, an arresting close-up montage of maritime decay, rusting chains, abandoned fishing nets, harbourside barnacles and other semi-abstract tableaux. Not since Derek Jarman has a director so lovingly explored the extra-terrestrial beauty of England’s liminal coastal landscapes.
The dramatic set-up feels like an old-fashioned ghost story. A fishing vessel called Rose of Nevada, tragically lost in a storm 30 years ago, mysteriously reappears in a small Cornish town. Oddly matter-of-fact about this uncanny resurrection, the boat’s owner (Jenkin cast regular Edward Rowe) decides his smartest course of action is to assemble a new crew and put the ship back to work. Once a thriving fishing community, the town is now in economic decline, so this reckless rush to action does at least have a modicum of plausible logic.
Despite his inexperience as a fisherman, Nick (MacKay) signs up for the crew, largely out of financial desperation. Times are hard, after all, and he has a wife and daughter to feed. Joining him on the Rose of Nevada are Liam (Turner), an opportunistic drifter who has been sleeping rough nearby, plus a grizzled old sea dog who could have stepped from the pages of a Victorian adventure novel (Francis Magee).
Captured by Jenkin in impressively hands-on, gut-ripping detail, the trio’s initial fishing foray is a success. The mind-bending weirdness only begins on their return home. Buzzing with life, packed shops and rowdy bars, their little town has somehow slipped back in time by three decades to 1993, a more prosperous bygone era. More unsettling for the time-travelling fishermen is how everyone else now greets them as the two young men who drowned on the Rose of Nevada 30 years ago.
Tormented by the prospect of permanent temporal exile from his family, Nick initially tries to persuade his incredulous neighbours (Mary Woodvine and Adrian Rawlins) that he is not their beloved son, which leads only to pain and confusion. By contrast, the rootless Liam is more than happy to abandon his old life and play along with his new identity as husband to the lusty, lovestruck Tina (Rosalind Eleazar). In the future timeline, all these people have suffered crushing, tragic loss. Even if Nick and Liam could reverse this mysterious time-warp and return to the way things were, should they condemn everyone to decades of misery again?
Flirting with stilted melodrama at times, Rose of Nevada hits a few choppy waves along the way. But behind its pulpy horror-lite tropes lies a haunting meditation on grief and guilt, poor life choices and second chances, embattled community spirit and collective folk memory. This is not Jenkin’s most original or powerful work, but it is still a compellingly enigmatic, ambiguous voyage into uncharted waters. As ever, the director composed the score himself, reinforcing the uneasy mood with wistful twangs, ominous rumbles and eerie electronic drones.
Director, writer, cinematography, editing, sound design, music: Mark Jenkin
Cast: George MacKay, Callum Turner, Rosalind Eleazar, Francis Magee, Mary Woodvine, Adrian Rawlins, Edward Rowe
Production designer: Felicity Hickson
Producer: Denzil Monk
Production company: Bosena (UK), Film4 (UK), BFI (UK)
World sales: Protagonist Pictures
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Orizzonti)
In English
114 minutes
