With his fourth film, Cornish director Mark Jenkin fuses his previous two outings into a hypnotic study of mental disintegration that, though its focus is a seemingly everyday person confronted by their demons in solitude (like his last film), makes a broader point (like the one before) about happier times in the British south-west’s economic history. To make that clearer, gentrification was the subject of his 2019 arthouse hit Bait, and creepy folklore figured strongly in his 2022 Cannes entry Enys Men. By contrast, Rose of Nevada is much more of an out-and-out genre piece than either, drifting closer to horror than the director ever has before, while retaining his haunting, glitchy, hand-distressed style, the cinematic equivalent of artist Francis Bacon’s distorted face paintings.
It’s also Jenkin’s first brush with commercial casting, pairing the established George McKay with up-and-comer Callum Turner, currently starring in this year’s silly-season Bond rumors. Both actors have a gnomic quality that suits a disturbing, ambiguous film in which nothing can be known for sure, and nobody is ever quite who they seem to be.
The film begins with images of flotsam and jetsam, barnacles, seaweed, shards of eroded metal and yards of torn nylon netting; all degraded relics of the once-thriving Cornish fishing industry. These images serve to summon up a ghost, the Rose of Nevada, a fishing boat that has returned, mysteriously, as readily as it disappeared 30 years before. A local businessman decides, just as mysteriously, that it must go back out to sea, and starts to look for a local crew, recruiting a grizzled old sea salt (Francis Magee) as skipper.
The skipper needs two crewmen, who turn out to be Nick (McKay) and Liam (Turner). Nick is a young father, struggling to make ends meet in his tumbledown home and feeding his family from foodbank donations. His elderly neighbor, Mr. Richards, lost his son in tragic circumstances, from which his wife (Mary Woodvine), now suffering from dementia, has never recovered. “My boy’s coming back,” she tells (or warns?) Nick, but Mr. Richards brushes it off. “Sometimes she gets the past and present mixed up,” he says, another omen of bad things to come. In contrast to Nick, the itinerant Liam is more of a Jack the Lad, and his floating moral compass will be tested in the drama that unfolds.
The three set out to sea and the voyage is a success — Jenkin really lands the visceral thrill of fishing — and the boys return home elated, with cash in hand. But while they’ve been away, something has changed. The town is busier than usual, and the pub is full, with paper notes and long-annulled coins changing hands. Liam is mistaken by a single mother for the father of her child, and cheerfully goes along with it, and after finding his home empty, Nick is taken in by the Richards — now, spookily, looking much, much younger — who insist he is their dead son. Unlike Liam, Nick is freaked out, especially when a local newspaper shows that the year is 1993, three years before he was born.
What is going on? Strap in. Like the ship it is named after, Rose of Nevada sails round in circles, creating a Möbius strip like Roman Polanski’s eerie 1976 chiller The Tenant, which this very much resembles. An uncanny mood is there from the start, heightened by some very arch performances — harking back to Jenkin’s penchant for non-synch dialogue — and some rather distracting old-age makeup, which is later leavened by the flashback scenes. Though it might seem like a flaw, it does play into the story’s strangeness, as Nick starts to wonder whether the whole situation is an elaborate prank.
But it’s not; it’s happening. On the surface, Rose of Nevada is about a man going down, under pressure to provide for his wife and daughter. On a deeper level, though, the film is an exploration of time, a trippy interpretation of the phrase “ghost town”, which is thrown around so much in today’s post-industrial landscapes. Once it gets going, there aren’t many clues as what it all means, or what’s real and what’s fantasy. But it could be telling that, at one point, Christopher Walken pops up on TV in David Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone (1983), a film about the malleability of the future. Rose of Nevada might be its opposite; when there’s no future, what else is there to do but endlessly rewrite the past?
Title: Rose of Nevada
Festival: Venice (Orizzonti Competition)
Director/screenwriter: Mark Jenkin
Cast: George MacKay, Callum Turner, Francis Magee, Edward Rowe, Rosalind Eleazar, Mary Woodvine
Sales agent: Protagonist
Running time: 1 hr 54 mins
