“All films are time travel films, and all films are ghost films,” said filmmaker Mark Jenkin at a post-screening Q&A for the New York Film Festival premiere of his new film, Rose of Nevada. This sentiment certainly applies to Jenkin’s films, preoccupied as they are with cycles that recur across time and past traumas that haunt the present. As with Jenkin’s previous films, Bait and Enys Men, Jenkin also commits a kind of technical time travel, as he shoots his films with 16mm Bolex cameras that must be hand-wound every 27 seconds and does not record live sound, so that the actors return for separate recording sessions months after the initial shoot to lay down their dialogue. (Filmmaker Rhayne Vermette also used Bolex cameras for the NYFF Currents selection Levers; just one more would make a trend).
Rose of Nevada, written by Jenkin from a story he conceived with his collaborator and romantic partner Mary Woodvine (who also plays a key role in the film), sees Jenkin taking on time travel as his literal subject, and he delivers absorbing and surprisingly emotional results. Jenkin plays with familiar, even cozy genre codes of ghost stories and time travel sagas, yet also invokes the drama of industrial decline previously explored in Bait and the dread-infused narrative experimentation of Enys Men, all encapsulated within his singular aesthetic approach. Rose of Nevada, then, is at once a satisfying supernatural tale and a sui generis work from an utterly individual filmmaker.
The title of Jenkin’s film refers to a mysterious fishing boat that has just returned, unmanned, to the port of an economically depressed fishing town in Cornwall. The boat had been lost decades prior after an accident that devastated the local community — the crew was killed, and a guilt-wracked survivor who stayed ashore died by suicide soon after — and the boat’s owner cobbles together a small crew to go out to sea once again. Liam (Callum Turner) is running away from an undisclosed past he’d like to forget, and Nick (George MacKay) is a struggling father and husband who takes the job in the hopes of fixing his leaky roof. When they return to shore, Liam and Nick find they have somehow been sucked back to 1993, when the town’s fishing industry was still thriving, and that they have taken on the identities of two of the crew members. Liam, with few attachments, accepts his new reality, but Nick fights against it, creating conflict both within himself and within the still-intact community.
Jenkin’s usage of 16mm Bolex film creates an aesthetic that is at once vivid and grainy. Rich colors abound in a flickering frame, suiting both the supernatural qualities of the narrative and, in the present-day scenes, the fishing town’s state of terminal decline. Jenkin indeed engineers constant collisions between naturalistic drama and fanciful horror tropes; for instance, within a cast of largely grounded performances, Woodvine’s and Francis Magee’s performances as an eerie old woman and a swarthy sea captain, respectively, would be right at home in a Val Lewton-produced B-horror film of the 1940s. Jenkin balances character-based drama, genuine dread, and playful humor for much of the film — a potentially risky tonal and narrative concoction that, because of its expert execution, allows the audience to dial in rather than alienating them — yet as the film progresses, he also finds an increasing number of opportunities to dig into the complex emotional landscape inherent in the narrative, with MacKay’s performance serving as the true emotional tether.
Nick, a loving father and husband barely keeping his head above water, is a sympathetic character from the start, and MacKay consistently brings his inner turmoil to the surface through his expressive performance. What becomes clear as the film progresses is that Nick has been caught in a thorny moral quandary: all he wants is to return to his wife and daughter, yet he has also been tasked by some unseen force to alter a tragic history. MacKay is visibly anguished for much of the film, his face contorting in different permutations of terror, despair, and anxiety as he struggles to accept his new reality. (Turner, giving a relaxed, charming performance peppered with darker subtext, acts as an effective foil.) It’s a deeply committed, invariably effective performance that provides the film with emotional weight that pays off in the film’s subtle, poignant conclusion.
Rose of Nevada is richly crafted all around. In addition to directing, writing, and shooting the film, Jenkin also served as its editor, composer, and co-sound designer with Ian Wilson, and contributed a keen sense of temporal rhythm and an intricate and tense soundscape in these capacities. Production designer Felicity Hickson and costume designer Jo Thompson’s designs are rigorously detailed, forming an immersive environment in both timelines. Jenkin’s film, ultimately then, proves to be a rare achievement on every level: crafted with both precision and uncompromising artistry, imbued with narrative pleasures and provocative ambiguities, and revolving around a pulsating emotional core, Rose of Nevada transcends the limited space-time of the cinema and follows the viewer into waking life.
Published as part of NYFF 2025 — Dispatch 4.
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