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| Director Mark Jenkin |
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| director on the set |
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| 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.
