Programme Notes: Rose of Nevada

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Programme Notes: Rose of Nevada

by Rory Doherty, freelance critic and journalist

Please note: these programme notes contain descriptions of plot and characters and are best read after watching the film.

The first minute of Rose of Nevada (Dir. Mark Jenkin, 2025) doesn’t feel like it reveals a lot, but it is rich with detail. Jenkin, who shot and edited the film, in addition to writing and directing it, cuts between close-ups of fishing dock detritus – limp, rusted, and chipped objects each sporting a unique sense of abandonment. We are in an unnamed Cornish town that is unmistakably on its last legs; as we learn from scenes beyond these up-close-and-personal looks at coastal artefacts, the post office is now a boarded-up food bank, the lone pub is eerily, depressingly quiet, and the docks see absolutely no fishing business.

But when paired with Rose of Nevada’s other motifs – lapping waves without a horizon, well-worn coins handled by rough hands, clocks that freeze their ticking second hands in especially eerie moments – the seaside debris that Jenkin’s clockwork Bolex H16 camera pores over has a unique significance in his grandest and most mystical feature to date. We are surrounded with symbols of lost time, memory and neglect, all of which will be mystically transformed by the story’s dreamlike time-warp.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter given the month before the film premiered at last year’s Venice Film Festival, the director of BAFTA-winning Bait (2019) succinctly described Rose of Nevada as ‘a ghost boat time travel film’. The ‘Rose of Nevada’ is a fishing boat tragically lost at sea that, to the local community’s surprise, unceremoniously returns to shore – Jenkin calls the magic vessel the film’s ‘narrative motor’. A small crew is thrown together: there’s the scruffy, married-to-the-sea skipper (Francis Magee), the earnest family man Nick (George MacKay), and the out-of-town drifter Liam (Callum Turner), who gets the job in the hope of a regular payday and a guaranteed blowout at the pub.

The first fishing expedition is a success, albeit marked by a distinct eeriness, and sets the tone for the scenes of rigorous, sea-faring labour that Jenkin returns to throughout the film. When the boat returns to shore, the crew discover they have slipped back in time to 1993. Here, Nick and Liam are greeted as Rose of Nevada’s former drowned crewmates: Nick is taken for Luke, the late son of his elderly neighbours (now 30 years younger) and Liam is Alan, a lousy father who is hounded by the mother of his child (Rosalind Eleazar) for overdue child support cash payments.

In both cases, Nick and Liam (now Luke and Alan) are welcomed into the homes of people they initially met in their own time period. Luke’s parents live next door to Nick’s young family, and when he and his partner find Luke’s grieving mother standing outside her front door with a vacant expression on her face, it’s clearly not the first time she’s had such an episode. Liam recently met Alan’s widow in the pub when she pulled her grown-up daughter Jess (Yana Penrose) away from snogging the handsome, pint-seeking new face in town – Jess and Alan’s brief kiss adds a strange, awkward tension to Liam’s decision to accept Alan’s family as his own when he slips 30 years back in time. By contrast, Nick is desperate to escape the uncomfortable proximity with the affection and wounds of someone else’s family – he maintains his own identity even as Luke’s parents make his bed and cook slap-up meals, meekly smiling through his protestations.

Nick’s determination to return to his time is driven by a fear of losing a loving partner and daughter in the present-day, while Alan’s dubious acceptance of his new situation taps into the fact that the Cornish village in 1993 seems like a total improvement on the present-day version – aided no doubt by the soothing, warm nostalgia of trademark 1990s images, textures, and food, enough to placate the wariness of any out-of-time itinerant labourer. But fresh off his folkish psychodrama Enys Men (Dir. Mark Jenkin, 2022), Jenkin knows that films that mimic the rhythms of dreams are readily charged with danger – on the fishing boat, Nick sees fleeting, foggy glimpses of the fisherman whose life he inadvertently claimed, and in one memorable sequence, he steals a Toyota in an attempt to – somehow – escape his circumstances, quickly falling into a sensory nightmare that’s elevated by retro-horror effects and intense, bassy sound design. (On top of Jenkin providing the film's score, which seemingly blends the sounds of chimes and foghorns, Jenkin records no sound on location, creating the entire sound mix in post-production.)

When Rose of Nevada is disturbing and hallucinatory, it always feels connected to the characters’ struggle to acclimatise themselves to their impossible new (or, old?) surroundings. Nevertheless, this effect is best achieved by Jenkin’s more patient, attentive cinematography – it’s hard to think of a face better loved by a Bolex camera than George Mackay’s in Rose of Nevada. The actor spends a considerable chunk of the film in close-up, his tense jaw and worried eyes dominating the film’s almost-square aspect ratio. The most heartbreaking instance of this comes late in Nick’s desperate attempt to break away from Luke’s beyond-the-grave influence: he breaks into his future home (currently unoccupied) and stands steely and defiant in the totally dark kitchen, as if he’s trying to wake from a dream by repeating in his mind, ‘This isn’t real, this isn’t real.’

The dichotomy between the crewmates gives Rose of Nevada’s treatment of British nostalgia some welcome complexity. To put in context with recent British films with similar themes on their mind, Jenkin’s latest is far more similar to Aftersun (Dir. Charlotte Wells, 2022) than Last Night in Soho (Dir. Edgar Wright, 2021), combining the story’s nostalgic reveries with dangerous psychological slippage.

As Jenkin told The Hollywood Reporter, ‘I was brought up with a sense of being Cornish and that Cornish was a separate ancient nation within Britain.’ Perhaps Rose of Nevada’s village is Jenkin’s representation of Cornwall in microcosm, tinged with a ghostly magic that, unlike the rest of the country, allows the region to retreat from Britain’s future decline, inadvertently trapping itself in a thriving past moment that's living on borrowed time.

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