Mark Jenkin makes movies that feel unearthed from the deep, dark recesses of the subconscious, where names, faces, emotions, and events are tethered together by hazy associate links.
As with 2022’s Enys Men, the Cornish writer/director’s Rose of Nevada—premiering at the Venice Film Festival—imagines water as a conduit for facilitating and strengthening those connections, as well as exists in a netherworld that is somewhere between waking and sleeping. It’s a dreamy tale of loss and grief, death and resurrection, as well as a supernatural reverie about the mysterious relationship between the present and past—one in which the living are reborn as ghosts.
In an unidentified coastal village, Mike (Edward Rowe) is stunned to discover that the Rose of Nevada, a fishing ship that vanished without a trace 30 years earlier, has returned to port.
As with so much of his tale, Jenkin imparts this information through snippets of dialogue and an editorial structure that correlates various images, including a photograph of the two men—Luke and Adam—who set out on the vessel and never returned. Mike’s careful inspection of the boat reveals it to be soggy, rusty, and derelict.
His astonishment is shared by Tina (Slow Horses’ Rosalind Eleazar), who owns that snapshot of Luke and Adam on the deck of the Rose of Nevada, and whose own photo adorns the craft’s inner cabin. There’s no explanation for the ship’s reappearance, and neither Mike nor Tina seek it. When a prospective skipper (Francis Magee) materializes out of nowhere, Mike begins assembling a crew so it can resume operations.
Opening sights of sodden, corroded, and barnacled surfaces establish Rose of Nevada’s dark, damp atmosphere, while its haunting unreality is conjured by Jenkin’s decision to shoot on 16mm and to construct every aspect of the action’s audio in post-production.
The graininess of the director’s visuals, which often burst into blooming, overexposed reds and yellows, provides the film with an illusory sheen, as if everything were happening through a fuzzy filter. That notion is exacerbated by his mannered compositions and the attendant performances of his leads, whose movements and line readings are deliberately stilted and unnatural. It’s primarily amplified, however, by Jenkin’s Spaghetti Western-esque soundscape of ADR voices and recreated noises, all of which are dialed to 11 so that every clank, shriek, bang, and crunch reverberates with hollow, cacophonous impact.
As Mike and Tina cope with the Rose of Nevada’s homecoming, Nick (George MacKay) returns to the house he shares with wife Emily and their young daughter. After ushering inside his aged neighbor Ms. Richards (Mary Woodvine), who looks like a stringy-haired horror-movie hag, Nick tries to fix the leak in his kitchen ceiling, only to make matters worse and, ultimately, to fall feet-first through the roof.
Though the reason for his decision isn’t explicated until later, Nick reacts to this calamity by taking a job aboard the Rose of Nevada, making him the third crew member alongside the skipper and Liam (Callum Turner), who’s been living in a shack across from the harbor. The trio embarks on a two-day fishing expedition, during which the skipper teaches his charges how to gut fish (“Head to a—–e”) and how to man the enormous, screeching winch that lowers and raises their net.
Following a successful voyage, the three make it safely back to shore. But no sooner have Nick and Liam disembarked than the latter is greeted warmly by Tina, who’s dressed as if she were younger and who’s holding the hand of her pre-adolescent daughter Jess, who had previously been seen as an adult (as was her sister Linsey, and both were played by Yana Penrose).
Nick, meanwhile, finds that his home is empty and his elderly neighbors are middle-aged and convinced that he’s their long-lost son. As made clear by a newspaper dated Aug. 13, 1993, the Rose of Nevada has somehow traveled back in time, and Nick and Liam have become Luke and Adam.
For Nick, separated from his wife and child by decades, this is nightmarish. Liam, however, is more amenable to his circumstances, since rather than a homeless loner, he’s transformed into a beloved father and husband with a roof over his head and a well-paying job.
Repetitions echo throughout Rose of Nevada, and in ways that seem to defy logic. Upon first settling into the Rose of Nevada, Nick spies the message “Get Off the Boat Now” carved into his bunk, but it later disappears—and, ultimately, he carves it into the wood himself.
What once was lost is now found, and vice versa, and faced with no rational means of reversing this phenomenon, Nick continues to go out on the Rose of Nevada, hoping to again cross the invisible threshold that divides yesterday and today. Despite his search for clarity, little is forthcoming, and gradually, his two worlds begin melding into one, forcing him to grapple with an existence in which the interior and exterior are in fundamental disharmony.
As Rose of Nevada’s conjoined protagonists, MacKay is disturbed and forlorn, and Turner is nonchalant and practical. Yet it’s Jenkin’s direction that genuinely gets under the skin. Habitually focusing on his leads’ hands and shoes, such that one becomes intimately familiar with every crease on their fingers and scuff on their boots and sneakers, the filmmaker revisits images and sounds to trancelike effect.
An early clip of Christopher Walken in The Dead Zone speaks to the proceedings’ fascination with time and man’s inability to comprehend or control it – or, furthermore, to change anything that’s come before or lies ahead. Nick and Liam’s remembrances of things past highlight their similar desires for home, family, security, and love. But just as Jenkin provides no easy answers, he offers scant straightforward paths for his main characters, who are ultimately trapped by forces out of their control.
Rose of Nevada is, narratively speaking, less bonkers than Enys Men. Nonetheless, it shares with that predecessor a feel for the unspoken ties that bind people to the land and sea, their recollections and hopes for the future, and the ancient currents that course through the universe and points beyond.
Ethereal, enigmatic, and unsettling, it’s part ominous science fiction, part melancholy memory piece, and—as is true with all of Jenkin’s work—unlike just about anything else in contemporary cinema.
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