Rose of Nevada (Mark Jenkin) 2025. Produced by Denzil Monk for Bosena, with support from the BFI and Film4. On General release in Irish and UK cinemas from April 24th 2026.
A young two man crew, with an elderly sea dog of a captain, take to sea on a fishing trip in the economically poorer present. They achieve a good catch but on return are time-slipped back to their Cornish village as it existed thirty years previous, when the community was financially prosperous. One of the crew accepts his fate as good fortune whilst the other feels trapped in a nightmare where his wife and daughter are no longer present.
That’s the SF premise of Mark Jenkin’s effectively disturbing Rose of Nevada. Out of a ghostly sea ballad Jenkin’s crafts an eerily atmospheric tale of identities lost and wrongly re-claimed by a community, insistent that you stay put and constantly fish for them, forever.
Any disbelieve is suspended owing to the fine acting of George Mackay as Nick - in need of money to fix his leaking roof, through which he crashes, suggesting a portal to another time. And there’s Callum Turner as Liam, an opportunist and stranger to the community, adopting the new role of father and husband for a pleased and widowed 1993 family.
What also drives Rose of Nevada is Jenkin’s unerring eye for odd detail combined with an editing that keeps shifting the ground from under our feet (Are we in dream time, alternative universe time or even stable real time?). Ambiguity pervades a film of time and memory determined by a calm or stormy sea.
All is beautifully photographed in 16mm digitised to 35mm where red infiltrates the frame and you imagine things decomposing. Above all Rose of Nevada is about the filming of the natural world and mundane objects that signal menacing traps for its characters. It becomes a time slip container always in danger of falling into the rusty beauty of decay – the damaged roof, cliff top rocks with its foliage and flowers: much shiny if tacky decoration of a 90’s pub; a warning scratched in a cabin saying “Get off the boat” or even simply a hot meal of very red looking beans and sausages (provided by Nick’s creepy new parents): such things consistently alarm and mysteriously disconcert Nick and we the audience.
When Nick does fleetingly meet again, in reality or fantasy, his family, from a lost time, Nick’s wife Emily (Mae Voogd) simply says there is “No time.” An observation that’s both consoling and alarming. Either time, as Nick’s normally experienced it, isn’t the total reality, doesn’t exist or there’s literally no time left now for Nick to be reunited with his family. This is a really moving and stand-out moment in Rose of Nevada: haunting, plangent and very memorable.
Rose of Nevada is the third part of a Cornish trilogy that includes the powerfully realist Bait and the folk horror excursions of Enys Men. It’s a little too slow at the beginning and Jenkin’s script falls back into mannerism’s of dialogue that for me flawed his first film Bait. I appreciate that in remote Cornish sea villages people still use archaic words like “tis” and “hark” but when they are accompanied by long, pregnant pauses it kept reminding me of the stilted social realism of some 60s/70s British TV and cinema.
Although speech and reaction initially falter, Jenkin’s visual signature triumphs in the storytelling. His direction, photography and music sound design make for an intelligent, confident and original filmmaker. I suspect Jenkin’s been influenced by the documentaries of John Grierson and Robert Flaherty, with their great broad feel for nature, and also the sea horror fiction of William Hope Hodgson and time travelling of Philip K. Dick. But Jenkin is an original artist and on a first viewing Rose of Nevada is perhaps his most mature, original and boldest film yet.
Rose of Nevada is a remarkable cyclic dream journey that’s alternatively disturbing and strangely reassuring about what’s lost and unexpectedly found in Nick’s new weird time zone of communal duty and expected response.
- Alan Price
