Rose of Nevada

 

Director Mark Jenkin

director on the set

primary cast

ROSE OF NEVADA             B                                                                                                Great Britain  (114 mi)  2025  d: Mark Jenkin

Guilt’s hard shadow to live under.                                                                                                 —Mr. Richards (Adrian Rawlins)

One would have to surmise that living in a fishing community would lend itself to hearing every manner of exaggerated tall tales when it comes to sea chanties, ship wrecks, or embellished fishing stories, but this one is a doozy, as it incorporates time travel, building a story around a supernatural mystery, venturing into the territory of Shane Carruth’s PRIMER (2004), yet actualized cinematically in a decidedly different manner, as this is more of a sensory experience, where the introspective aspect both invites and resists interpretation.  The concluding segment of the director’s Cornish Trilogy, which began with BAIT (2019), an experimental, Brexit-era drama about the corrosive effect of tourism on coastal towns, rooted in the local Cornish culture and community of the southwestern United Kingdom that shows how marginalized places are facing up to a changing world, followed by Enys Men (2022), a metaphysical horror tale that plunges us into a fractured reality that explores the psychological depths of loneliness from extreme isolation.  Both films question the nature of identity, as people somehow feel unmoored by the challenges presented in their current circumstances, as if they’ve drifted into another dimension, where this film literally takes us there, with a droning opening musical track that sets the mood with its endlessly echoing reverberation, Kneebone Barton YouTube (5:20).  Mark Jenkin is not for everyone, as his artistic aesthetic is exclusively his own, shooting on a 50-year-old Bolex H-16 16mm camera, which has a maximum of 27 seconds of uninterrupted footage before it needs rewinding, using no live sound recording, as it’s all post synchronized later in a studio, where Jenkin writes, directs, shoots, edits, designs the sound, and composes the musical score, so his imprint is all over this film, made with a £1.3 million funding contribution from the British Film Institute.  Set in a nearly abandoned fishing village in Cornwall, a ruggedly beautiful coastal region, where thirty years ago the loss of the fishing vessel Rose of Nevada along with its crew devastated the once thriving community, which has never recovered, left in economic decline, with local businesses boarded up, houses in a state of decay, while many of its residents have moved elsewhere.  Yet one day, the ship magically reappears in the harbor, tied to the dock, sitting there all alone, with no explanation how it got there.  Shocked at the sight of it, former owner and town businessman Mike (Edward Rowe) decides to clean it up, find a crew, and send it out again, with Captain Murgey (Francis Magee, a former fisherman from the Isle of Man) suddenly appearing on the wharf as a skipper for hire, which sets the action in motion.  It’s important to remember that the 1980’s and 90’s were defining, highly emotional decades for Cornwall’s working class, marked by intense political, economic, and cultural discussions surrounding the collapse of its traditional fishing and mining industries, leading to economic deprivation.  Having grown up there, the director’s familiarity with Cornish history is unmistakable, with this film rooted in the bleak political realities of 2020’s Britain.

Hypnotic and fascinating, this is an uncommonly unique way to explore an economic crisis rooted in history, while at the same time examining the difficulties involved in the struggle to find one’s place in a changing world.  Early on the film centers around Nick (George MacKay, from Bertrand Bonello’s 2024 Top Ten List #9 The Beast (La Bête), who represents the desire to offer a better future to his family, his wife Emily (Mae Voogd), and their daughter, as he attempts to fix a hole in the roof where the rain leaks in, but only makes things worse, actually falling through the roof, while next door, the ghostly figure of a senile Mrs. Richards (Mary Woodvine, the director’s partner and story collaborator) stands outside in the rain, confusing Nick with her son Luke who was lost tragically, speaking gloomily, as if in prophecy, like one of the witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.  Helped inside by Emily, Mr. Richards (Adrian Rawlins) is off paying tribute to the cliffside overlook peering out at the sea, still grieving over the loss of their son Luke, who jumped to his death from the overwhelming pressure of guilt over what happened to those original fisherman, blaming himself, as his absence left them one crew member short.  Tina (Rosalind Eleazar) is the black girlfriend of one of the men lost at sea, who is left to raise their child alone.  This is not the first case of mistaken identity, as it recurs throughout the film, but it serves as an ominous foreshadowing.  Like all of Jenkin’s films, this is a meditation on time and memory, missed opportunities, and sparsely populated communities that appear doomed to repeat the same mistakes, yet filled with ambiguity, which forces viewers to more closely examine the small, often-overlooked details.  With wider distribution than his earlier work, this film is every bit as peculiar, expressing an offbeat formalism, where Jenkin allows the film to get damaged, scratched, and even overexposed, yet the colors are extremely vivid, as he’s going for an aged look of what films used to look like before the transition to a more washed-out dreariness from digital video.  Without the cash to pay for the roof, Nick volunteers to be one of the members of the crew, leaving his wife and child behind for what is expected to be just a few days, Rose of Nevada (2026) | "See Ya" Ominous Clip YouTube (1:13), joined shortly afterwards by Liam (Callum Turner), a transitory worker sleeping on the docks with no family and no home, seemingly without a past, remaining something of an enigma for Nick, Rose of Nevada | Official clip | Now streaming on BFI Player YouTube (2:02).  There’s also a warning carved into the wood in the bunkroom on the boat that reads, ominously, “Get off the Boat now,” which suggests he may have been on this same journey before.  And so The Odyssey begins, only in this version, the sailor Odysseus can never return home to Penelope.  While the everpresent sea represents a conscious place, it’s also a vehicle for the unconscious to surface once the boat hits the shore, where the town becomes a time portal that plays havoc with the characters.   

Once at sea, it’s an immersive, labor-intensive experience with an exquisite sound design, where the mechanical sounds of hydraulic machinery to release and haul-in the trawling nets is balanced against the cry of gulls floating overhead, with stomping sounds heard in the background, like a mind-numbing metronome, which only accentuates the exhausting physical labor involved, yet all goes well, returning back with a full load of fish, but something’s not right when they return, as the town is thriving and filled with life, simply teeming with people and activity, not the desolate outpost they left, yet buried tensions rise to the surface and the community itself begins to feel restlessly adrift, as if existing out of time.  The fishing trade is the lifeblood of the community, where people come down in droves to help them unload their cargo, hauling off the fish before making the rounds at the town pub, which is absolutely packed with people, as the entire town has been completely re-invigorated.  The first thing Nick realizes is that his family is not where he left them, having simply disappeared, finding himself trapped in an existential nightmare, leaving him bewildered and horrified, with a much younger Mr. and Mrs. Richards mistaking him for their son Luke, and Liam for Alan, the two local boys lost at sea thirty years earlier, having gone back in time to 1993, where everyone welcomes them back home as if nothing has happened.  There are no sci-fi signs of this time difference, of course, and no one to explain what’s happened, though David Cronenberg’s THE DEAD ZONE (1983) is featured prominently in one scene, as we only see the confusion in Nick’s eyes, where Liam simply assumes the role of Alan, picking up with his girlfriend Tina, as if that’s who he’s been with all along, ROSE OF NEVADA | Official Clip #1 YouTube (1:25).  The two men have essentially switched roles, as Nick now has no one, just like Liam did initially, while Liam is happy to have gained a new home and family that isn’t really his, but he likes having a sense of belonging, even if it’s a little creepy that he once flirted with Tina’s adult daughter Jess (Yana Penrose) in a different time period.  Meanwhile, Nick is disenchanted with his new family, remaining emotionally distant and aloof, profoundly missing his real family, who only appear to him in dreams, ROSE OF NEVADA | Official Clip # 3 YouTube (40 seconds).  Murgey doesn’t seem to notice, or care, as he just stays on the boat.  Embraced by this new community, who come together to weave a new net, as the other one was lost in a storm, Nick keeps searching for the family he has seemingly lost, so he keeps getting back onto the boat, hoping at some point he will return to his life in the present, ROSE OF NEVADA | Exclusive Clip | A Film by Mark Jenkin YouTube (1:11).  Stuck in an endless time-loop, warned never to allow themselves to go out undermanned, as that would spell their doom, the time traveling aspect is the glue that holds this together, as it’s a horror film of psychological disorientation, affecting each of these men differently, having assumed lives that are not their own, yet it’s what fate has handed them.  Essentially constructing the film around something that does not belong, Emily delivers the mystifying final line, “There is no time,” in an eerie, hallucinatory vision that finally merges the past with the present, where the emotional consequences of the time jump become painfully clear.

Blue Heron

 

Writer/director Sophy Romvari

director on the set

BLUE HERON          B                                                                                                       Hungary  Canada  (90 mi)  2025  d: Sophy Romvari

What drew me to this film, awarded the best debut feature at Locarno and best Canadian feature at the Toronto Film Fest, was the locale, having been to Vancouver Island in the Pacific Northwest, surprisingly at the exact same time frame in the late 90’s as the film, before the prevalence of cellphones and GPS, where one of the highlights was the abundance of indigenous art to be found, especially in the galleries of the small town of Tofino on the western coast, where the ruggedness of the terrain and the enormous Douglas Fir and cedar trees is nothing less than remarkable, growing three times faster near salmon rivers that enrich the soil, while also attracting thousands of eagles and grizzly bears, creating a harmonious blend of nature and wildlife.  This film, however, ignores that entirely and takes place mostly in the urban environment of Nanaimo on the eastern coast overlooking the Georgia Straight, just a ferry’s ride away from Vancouver, though, as is often the case in films, much of it was actually shot in North Vancouver.  Not to be confused with Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron (Kimitachi wa dô ikiru ka) (2022), this is actually more along the lines of Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), or Jane Campion’s Sweetie (1989), but without the artistic firepower, featuring a morose, acutely disturbed teenage boy wreaking emotional havoc on his family, yet initially he just seems like any other moody, disaffected, and self-absorbed teenage kid whose anti-social rebelliousness manifests itself by inappropriately acting out, creating chaos out of nothing, drawing attention to himself and those around him, straining the family dynamic, yet he’s never viewed as a villain, always perceived as just a kid who’s also capable of displaying moments of tenderness.  Loosely diagnosed with “oppositional defiant disorder,” literally rebelling against authority, yet this barely scratches the surface, as intervention fails miserably, leaving the parents in despair, having to deal with an underlying anxiety that permeates their core existence, but leaving them feeling helpless by knowing so little about it, which is only magnified by the children’s inability to understand, knowing something is wrong but not knowing what to do about it, as there was limited knowledge and few available resources to address this kind of situation at the time, eventually recommending placement with a foster family, which lingers like a death in the family.  In reality, Romvari lost two older brothers in early adulthood, both struggling with mental illness, tragedies that may have inspired this film, forged out of grief and love.  Written by the director, shot by Maya Bankovic, subtly told from the point of view of a young 8-year old girl, Sasha (Eylul Guven), she is part of a Hungarian-Canadian family of six who move to British Columbia’s Vancouver Island in the late 90’s, where initially nothing out of the ordinary occurs, establishing a natural rhythm and flow, as characters move in and out of view as we get accustomed to the normal patterns of life, with an introverted photographer husband (Ádám Tompa) who mostly stays out of the fray by burying himself in work on his desktop computer, leaving a beleaguered mother (Iringó Réti) with way too much responsibility looking after the children on her own, leaving her frustrated, at her wit’s end, and emotionally exhausted.  He notably does bring the children into the dark room to develop photographs, as they watch with wonderment at what feels like magic when the images suddenly appear out of nothing.     

As we are lured into their familiar routines, going to the beach, watching cartoons or National Geographic animal episodes, making paper boats in the sink, playing in the sprinkler outside on the lawn, inflating water balloons, spraying one another with the garden hose, or jumping on the trampoline, no one personality stands out, but the oldest teenage boy Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), the only child born from the mother’s previous relationship, is much older and towers over the other children, consisting of two boys about the same age as Sasha, but as time goes on he gets to be a handful, never listening to his parents, ignoring them completely while acting suspiciously as his behavior grows more erratic, becoming increasingly dangerous, precariously walking on the roof, breaking windows with his hand, disappearing frequently for long periods of time, remaining aloof and isolated, barely ever uttering a word, with no interactions and no friends to speak of, mostly keeping to himself, viewed at the time as a “problem child,” a loaded expression from the 90’s.  Loosely based on her own immigrant experience, drawing upon her own family life, as her parents and three brothers all moved from Hungary to British Columbia a year before she was born, the director has been making short documentaries since 2011 before making her first feature, which enlarges the canvas, yet there’s an understated quietness to the film, filled with distance and space between incidents, where it’s not about narrative coherence but establishing an interior mood in a diary-like series of reflections on childhood memories where she literally bears her soul, shining a light on what was the elephant in the room growing up.  Featuring a “haze of a languid summer” atmosphere, reminiscent of Lucrecia Martel’s LA CIÉNAGA (2001), heavily emphasizing silence, ambient sound, and the emotional weight of memory, we follow the parents struggling to understand, not knowing what to do, yet we also get glimpses of reality through the eyes and ears of Sasha, whose own innocence is mixed with instability and uncertainty, where beauty and trauma exist side by side, as she starts to notice cracks in her family’s dynamics as they struggle to help their troubled teenage son, Clip Blue Heron subtitulado YouTube (1:21).  While there’s an ominous undertone beneath the placid surface, what remains questionable is whether this film is too distanced, never really allowing viewers in, so the characters may feel too far away to become emotionally invested.  Given that amount of personal intimacy, however, one of the scenes that stands out is a poignant, magical-realist epilogue toward the end of the film, a “last day” scenario within the childhood home for Jeremy, scored to the hauntingly elegant Adagio movement of Beethoven’s 5th piano concerto, Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-Flat Major, Op. 73: II. Adagio un ... YouTube (9:23), offering a sense of grandeur to the uncomfortable, allowing for a poetic reckoning with a family’s painful history, which elevates the moment, remaining imprinted in our imaginations, revealing art can provide additional perspectives, but not answers.  Only late in the film do we learn that Jeremy is a unique artist, with precise, color-coded, architectural-detailed drawings that map city neighborhoods, literally exploring a subjective artistic world rarely, if ever, featured.

Thematically linked to Romvari’s short film Still Processing (2020), an extended artistic inquiry into her own family history, something she describes as “memory retrieval,” in this case concerning a brother with profound emotional and mental health problems, music is curated to reflect a haunting evocative score and personal nostalgia, as if sourced from her father’s home videos.  Despite the personal nature of the film, it never feels forced, and instead reflects the fragmented memories of lived experiences, where it feels as if information is intentionally concealed from us, leaving only small snippets of a larger picture, where it’s easy to get caught up in the simple pleasures of growing up in the pre-cellphone, pre-internet 90’s, balancing the concerned viewpoints of the parents against the freewheeling style of the children, where playing with the sprinkler in the yard holds a certain nostalgic fascination, but then a more distressing situation occurs when Jeremy is brought home in handcuffs by the police for shoplifting, Clip 2 Blue Heron subtitulado YouTube (1:45), opening our eyes to a distress signal, a cry for help, which largely goes unanswered, as therapy sessions are unsuccessful.  But then something radically strange occurs, as the entire movie gets re-contextualized, growing more experimental, knocking the audience off-balance, which is a daring move, with the film jumping ahead twenty years, where time literally collapses, without any hints or reveals other than the use of cellphones are prevalent.  Suddenly we see Sasha as an adult (Amy Zimmer), though nothing informs us of this shift, as she’s taken an interest in exploring this earlier segment of her life that she couldn’t understand at the time, becoming both an observer and participant within her own memories, thoughtfully searching for a bridge between our experiences growing up and our reflections looking back on it, exploring her father’s photographs and videos, always filming what she discovers.  Searching for a better understanding of her troubled brother, specifically interested in how treatment programs may have advanced in evaluating Jeremy’s condition, she films the opinions of actual psychologists and therapists, yet it remains ambiguous right to the end, revealing in an opening voiceover, “It’s true I spent most of my life being angry at him.  The older I get, the more I feel like I never even knew him at all.  My image of him now, I know, falls flat compared to reality.”  Clearly wrestling with something that cannot be fully understood, never providing any clear answers, yet always remaining empathetic, Romvari uses a pseudo-documentary style of filmmaking to pay an elegiac tribute to her brother’s life, veering into Terrence Malick 2011 Top Ten Films of the Year #1 The Tree of Life realms with the expansive music of Brian Eno, Brian Eno - An Ending (Ascent) (Remastered 2019) YouTube (4:21), which plays as an adult Sasha is seen walking along the water with the Jeremy of her youth, literally becoming the filmmaker the director has become before our eyes, but never directly making that connection, instead it’s merely hinted at through poetic imagery.  In this sense, the film bears a remarkable resemblance to the visual language and evocative time shift at the end of Charlotte Wells’ 2023 Top Ten List #7 Aftersun, as both films weave memory and imagination into attempts to understand a family member that remains forever outside our grasp.  The director, on Letterboxd, listed a number of films of influence, Films that influenced Sophy Romvari's 'Blue Heron', many of which reflect a 1970’s naturalism, home movie aesthetics, and intimate family dramas, citing the performance-driven focus of John Cassavetes, the zoom lens usage of Robert Altman, and personal, nostalgic memory-focused work, with her parents’ own creative backgrounds and home videos deeply shaping her style.  Interestingly, after each night of production she’d read at least one chapter of Ray Carney’s 2001 book Cassavetes On Cassavetes.  There’s also an Éric Rohmer Le Rayon Vert (Summer) (1986) magical moment with a flashing light image seen near the end (purely unintentional, it seems) that adds a mysterious presence, like a call from beyond, or a land of twilight, as if part of the netherworld of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s VAMPYR (1932).

Sophy Romvari's Closet Picks Criterion YouTube (3:43)