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.

Enys Men

Director Mark Jenkin

ENYS MEN               B+                                                                                                            Great Britain  (96 mi)  2022  d: Mark Jenkin

Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare.  Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else’s dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it.  The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.                                                                  —Joan Didion from The Paris Review, 1978

A metaphysical horror flick with Nicolas Roeg sensibilities, including the intrusion of the natural world in Walkabout (1971) and the recurring red coat image from Don't Look Now (1973), yet also in the editing, with its free-associative cross-cutting in time and space, where the bleak remoteness recalls Michael Powell’s The Edge of the World (1937), with a minimalist yet repeating narrative that resembles the carefully choreographed, almost mathematically precise shooting scheme of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce,1080 Bruxelles (1976), yet also delves into ghostly realms.  This is one of the better efforts of using the COVID lockdown as a metaphor, shot during the pandemic, where isolation is a recurrent theme as we follow an anonymous middle-aged woman known only as a wildlife volunteer (Mary Woodvine, the director’s partner), the sole resident living alone on an island off the Cornish coast, instead spending her time hiking around the island in her hiking boots, studying and collecting data on a rare flower growing on the cliffs, making scientific entries into a daily journal, where at least initially not much changes as we see her making a cup of tea while listening to the scratchy sounds of a shortwave radio broadcast and/or a two-way radio.  The grind of the routine is all that matters, with the director establishing a rhythm and unpretentious avant-garde aesthetic where not much happens, providing no clear answers by the end, with very little human interaction, as it’s all about capturing the minute details of daily living in such an isolated existence, an exploration of time, memory, nature, and grief, expressed with a sense of dread and foreboding, where it’s not really horror per se, but a cinematic aesthetic.  Like the Dogma tradition, The 10 Rules of "Dogme 95", The Danish Film Movement, on Christmas Day 2012 Jenkin typed out his Silent Landscape Dancing Grain 13 film manifesto, checkthis.com/sldg13, consisting of 13 rules promoting his own film aesthetic, “to be realised with a minimum of fuss.”  Rules, of course, that are later meant to be broken!  In something of a one-man project, the film is written, directed, shot, and edited, with a post synchronized sound design and ambient musical score written by Cornish filmmaker Mark Jenkin, shot on 16mm using highly saturated color on aged film stock, using an outdated, wind-up Bolex camera that allows only 27 seconds per shot, where the authentic look of the film includes recurring dirt scratches and light flare-ups around the grainy edges of the frame, yet there’s an intoxicating style to the repetitious visual design of the film that is not like anything you typically see, featuring a prominent and almost playful use of a zoom lens, feeling more like an immersive viewer experience.  Jenkin’s earlier film BAIT (2019), winner of the Outstanding Debut while nominated for Outstanding British Film of the Year at the British Bafta Film Awards in 2020 that ultimately became the most successful Cornish film ever made, had a silent film era look and was also shot in a picturesque Cornish fishing village, part of England’s rugged southwestern tip where the coast is lined with towering cliffs overlooking the Celtic Sea.  Though language is sparse, occasionally heard over the radio or in carefully chosen songs, the emphasis is much like Colm Bairéad’s use of Gaelic in The Quiet Girl (An Cailín Ciúin) (2022), as there is an intentional choice to infuse the film with a thematic song written in an unsubtitled Cornish Celtic language, where a hidden history and culture are resurrected in spirit, actually reviving a Cornwall heritage that once thrived, but has now fallen on hard times, becoming part of the heart and soul of the film.      

Very much focused upon texture, where the medium of film itself becomes woven into the director’s experimental artistic aesthetic, Jenkin’s film premiered in Director’s Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival in 2022, where the title (pronounced ‘Ennis Main’) is Cornish for “Stone Island,” taking place on a rocky, wind-swept island, all rocks and moss and crumbling stone ruins, where her overgrown stone home appears to be the only surviving structure.  Her sense of isolation is magnified immensely by the surrounding quiet, providing a sense of timelessness, where the first spoken word comes about fifteen minutes into a film that features only a dozen or so lines of dialogue spoken throughout the whole experience.  From the journal entries we can tell this is set in 1973, where the film is built around the woman’s same schedule as she gets up in the morning, hikes around the island, looks at the flowers, takes the soil temperature, sees birds flying out over the open sea, drops a rock down an old mining shaft listening for the sound, and observes any changes of note before cranking up the generator to provide electricity in the old cottage where she is living, typically writing “no changes” in her journal, where the endless repetitive cycle resembles the onset of cabin fever in Kubrick’s THE SHINING (1980), as once things start to change, her mental outlook slowly deteriorates, with the director developing a strange fascination for filming backwards.  A younger girl (Flo Crowe) begins to appear in the house with her, a ghostly presence that also appears standing on the roof, but she also speaks to her in a motherly manner, though she may be a younger version of herself that simply appears to her, as if she’s seeing things in her imagination that spring from her own personal memories.  Viewers don’t know how long she’s been alone on this island, or how long she’s staying, as she’s running out of supplies, but apparently is expecting to be replenished by a supply boat, as she’s connected to the outside world by a CB radio, often ignoring the voices heard.  Ambiguous to the core, not really part of any pre-existing genre (though the director drew heavily from British horror films of the 70’s, occasionally resorting to schlock horror techniques), one of the first signs that her world is falling apart is an image of the boatman (Edward Rowe), who suddenly appears on this island, and may be her husband, but disappears just as quickly, like a repressed memory, seeing just a brief flash of the man’s face.  Equally stunning is the appearance of local schoolchildren dancing and singing folk songs outside her cottage, resembling a May Day ceremony, remnants of a vanished community, singing a specially commissioned Kernewek Kemmyn song Kan Me - YouTube (4:09) written and performed again over the end credits by Gwenno, a Welsh singer raised by a Welsh activist mother and a Cornish poet father, who has become something of a one-woman Celtic revival.  This song recurs several times throughout the film, providing an atmospheric refrain, where the haunting nature echoes a theme of internal pain and loss, adding yet another layer of texture, as the line between what’s real and what’s imagined becomes more blurred, taking a dark turn into the strange and metaphysical, forcing her, along with viewers, to question the nature of what is real and what is a developing nightmare.

The cawing sounds of seagulls and gannets comprise much of the film’s sound design and visual palette, as these birds were here long before the presence of humans, living in complete harmony with nature, seen dive bombing into the sea for fish, developing a miraculous instinct for survival even in the most remote places.  The camera seems as much interested in the island itself as the woman, perhaps merging into a single consciousness, continually alternating between long takes and sudden cuts that keep viewers off balance.  In an ironic twist, the woman can be seen reading Robert Allen and Edward Goldsmith’s A Blueprint for Survival each night before bed, one of the earliest warnings of climate change in 1972, a telling sign of her own fragile state of mind, offering precious insight into the tenuous state of her well-being and shifting equilibrium, as if her own survival is at stake.  There is a nautical theme of shipwrecks, with a memorial plaque on the island for seafarers lost at sea attempting to save a supply boat in 1897, as emergency warning sounds can be heard over the radio as if it was happening in the present, where she appears to get lost in a time warp, Enys Men | Exclusive Clip | Opens Friday - YouTube (1:15), diving ever deeper into the darkest corners of the unknown, Clip: Enys Men (NEON) - YouTube  (1:18).  She also hears inexplicable sounds in the middle of the night, like water dripping, or pounding sounds underneath the earth, where she moves to explore the origin only to discover the dirty faces of tin miners illuminated by candlelight in a dripping-wet cave, men who may have lost their lives there many years ago, while an elderly preacher (John Woodvine, Mary’s father, ninety-one years old at the time) delivers apocalyptic warnings of lost faith, heard singing a healing hymn, Let the Lower Lights Be Burning - YouTube (2:46), all adding to the spectral figures connected to the island’s history who make themselves known, remnants of a time long passed, mysteriously merging together the past, present, and future.  An ancient stone monolith that has been there all along (the Boswens Menhir, standing more than eight feet tall, Boswens Menhir – ancient history, mystery and modern ...), a memorial to those lost but not forgotten, suddenly changes positions on the familiar landscape, moving closer to the home, while the flowers have also disappeared, alerting viewers that something drastic is happening, perhaps losing all sense of self, 'Enys Men' Clip - Haunting Artifact a Catalyst to ... - YouTube (1:34).  Mysterious sounds are the connecting tissue of this unsettling film, taking us into unexplored realms, like the eerie electronic musical score, the rustling wind, or the waves ceaselessly pounding the craggy rocks along the shoreline, creating a symphony of sounds that mirror her alarming deterioration, where her journal entries warn us of significant changes, as reality starts to break down, suddenly contaminated by the surrounding world, where each passing day sends her deeper into her own darkness, plunging us into the world of Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf (Vargtimmen) (1968).  Jenkin grew up near the Merry Maidens Stone Circle, a collection of standing stones that have remained in a jagged circle since the Bronze Age, so his personalized familiarity with the history and cultural memory of the region has led to a twisted and discomforting portrait of human isolation, exaggerating the fear and paranoia associated with loneliness, creating an ominous reminder of how easily things are forgotten, where something truly terrifying can end up taking the place of everything we thought was familiar.  

Understanding Mark Jenkin's Cornish Folk Horror YouTube (17:12)