Mark Jenkin’s Cornish time-slip tale is his handsomest and most watchable film, with a first hour that put us right on the deck. The middle drifts while it decides what its mystery is for, but the sea and the two men hold.
The Rose of Nevada is a fishing boat that was lost years ago, and at the start of Mark Jenkin’s third feature she comes back. She drifts into a Cornish harbour that has had no fleet worth the name since she left, and the village does the only sensible thing, which is to put her back to work. Nick Dyer (George MacKay) and Liam (Callum Turner) take the berths. They go out, they fish, and the trip goes well. What they come back to is the film’s business, not ours.
This is the most watchable film Jenkin has made and, for most of its length, the best. Bait (2019) was a quarrel between locals and incomers told in silent-era close-ups; Enys Men (2022) was a woman, a flower and a standing stone, and dared you to find the story. Rose of Nevada has a story, with a beginning and a boat, and it spends a good hour earning the right to go strange. Where it slips is in the middle, when the mystery has been set and the film is not yet ready to say what it wants from it.
Jenkin shoots, cuts and scores the film himself, on 16mm, and the grain is the whole surface of the thing. Colours bleed at the edges, the image jitters as though the reel has been through the sea, and the sound is laid on afterwards, so that voices sit a fraction away from the mouths speaking them. Here it is the method: nothing on screen is quite where you left it, and the picture tells you so before anyone does. Felicity Hickson’s production design keeps the boat cramped and working, and Jo Thompson’s costumes carry a good deal of the telling once the story turns.
The fishing is the film’s best material. Jenkin gets in close on hands, rope, the winch, the catch coming over the side, and he holds there long enough that the work becomes work rather than montage. We felt the cold and the tilt of the deck. And when the men come up the quay after that first trip, we got a chill that had nothing to do with the weather, because Jenkin plays what they find flat, as a fact, and leaves us to do the arithmetic.
MacKay is the reason the second half holds. He plays Nick as a man who keeps his questions to himself, and Jenkin’s camera, which likes a face held still, gets a great deal out of him without asking him to explain anything. Turner has the showier task and is careful not to overplay it. The two men take what has happened to them differently, and the later stretch of the film is the distance that opens between them. Francis Magee, Edward Rowe, Rosalind Eleazar, Mary Woodvine and Adrian Rawlins fill out the village, and the faces are right; nobody looks bussed in.
That later stretch is also where we lost our footing, and then, for a while, our patience. Jenkin has decided not to explain the rules of what has happened, which is his right, but in the middle the film stops advancing and starts circling, and each circuit looks much like the last. There are scenes where the picture is telling a ghost story and the script a social one, and they pull against each other. Jenkin’s own score does more to hold the mood through this than the plotting does. At 114 minutes the film is not long, but it feels the length of a night at sea.
Underneath it is an argument about what happened to places like this one when the fish stopped paying, and the film is strongest when it leaves that in the pictures. It is Jenkin’s most generous film to an ordinary audience, and the generosity costs him a little of the strangeness that made Enys Men so hard to shake. See it in a cinema if you can; the grain that reads as sea air on a big screen reads as a faulty signal on a small one. Certificate 15, 114 minutes, and a boat worth the ticket before it does anything odd.
