Callum Turner, left, and George MacKay in Rose of Nevada.Steve Tanner/The Associated Press
Rose of Nevada
Written and directed by Mark Jenkin
Starring George MacKay, Callum Turner and Rosalind Eleazar
Classification N/A
Length 114 minutes
Opens in select theatres July 10
Critic’s Pick
There is no one else making films like Mark Jenkin. Not this century, at least.
Like his breakthrough 2019 drama Bait and his 2022 follow-up Enys Men, the British filmmaker’s latest feature, Rose of Nevada, was filmed using a vintage hand-cranked Bolex 16mm camera. Shooting a feature today in such a manner is not only technically challenging (all the sound must be constructed in post-production) but visually discombobulating, with the grainy footage suggesting an archeological artifact, reels from a civilization so distant from our own they may as well be ancient ancestors.
But that eccentric approach is also a perfect fit for Jenkin’s new material, given that his story this time revolves around two men who have become supernaturally displaced from their moment in history.
Set in a remote and impoverished Cornish fishing village, in more or less our contemporary era, the story follows two lads named Nick (George MacKay) and Liam (Callum Turner, tipped to be the future James Bond) who are each desperate for cash. Nick in particular is feeling the paycheque pinch, given that his homelife is literally falling apart thanks to a leaky ceiling, while Liam is romantically adrift and physically homeless.
Enter the Rose of Nevada, a fishing ship that suddenly reappears in the local harbour after being lost at sea for three decades. The vessel’s old captain eagerly takes possession of the Rose, despite all commonsense suggesting that everyone runs far away from the thing, and recruits Nick and Liam to be his crew. Naive and desperate, they agree. It isn’t long, of course, before even stranger things occur onboard, and time begins to fold into itself.
MacKay and Turner in Rose of Nevada.Ian Kingsnorth/Supplied
While Liam appears to take to his new space-time conundrum well enough, securing a new love interest a few years before he was even born, Nick is desperately seeking a way back to the reality that he once knew – even if the past he shouldn’t be a part of is beginning to look far brighter than the future that he knows is waiting for him. (If you think ahead, or are simply lucky like me, you can program Rose of Nevada as a double bill alongside Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You for a real dose of “I should call the contractor to make sure my home’s ceilings are stable” panic.)
Jenkin is not a filmmaker to linger on the whys and hows of his central mystery, but more the emotional and thematic instabilities that it introduces. For every minute that Nick and Liam spend as Vonnegut-like men out of time, their realities become that much more untethered to the basic trials and tribulations of any working stiff, in this era or the last. This head-spinning displacement is all injected with an extra sense of dizziness by Jenkin’s antiquated means of production, with every fizzle and pop of the 16mm film stock and every echo of the postproduction-added dialogue reminding the audience that the story is being dated in more ways than one.
The result is a film that is haunting and singular – a furnace-blast of the past reshaped and refashioned for our modern times. All aboard.