A fishing boat mysteriously returned to harbour after being lost for thirty years. From this image, Mark Jenkin weaves a haunting tale of dream-logic and the ghosts of England’s past. Jenkin’s unique filming style lends texture and physicality to this blend of British social realism and ghost story, even while the dream-like nature of it means that it fades like a dream upon ending.
The Rose of Nevada is moored in the harbour again, empty and seemingly abandoned like a ghost ship. Though the people of the village don’t understand how it came to be here, local businessman Mike (Edward Rowe) is keen to use it to rejuvenate the local fishing industry. He recruits a hoary old skipper (Francis Magee) and two men with no other prospects (George MacKay and Callum Turner) who need money badly enough to go out on the mysterious boat. As they set off, strange prophecies – “That boat was lost […] She went down shorthanded, didn’t she” – and warnings carved into the boat itself – “get off the boat now” – fail to deter the men from their ominous errand.
Jenkin once again brings the lushly textured cinematography for which he has become known. Like his previous features, BAIT and ENYS MEN, ROSE OF NEVADA is shot on 16mm film using a 1976 wind-up Bolex camera, with dialogue and Foley recorded afterwards and post-synced with the visuals. This is in keeping with Jenkin’s Silent Landscape Dancing Grain 13 Film Manifesto written in 2012, a series of rules like Dogme 95 which promote “the aesthetic and practical benefits of handmade celluloid work.” The blotches and imperfections of the film stock and the lush colours that he’s able to pick up provide constant reminders of physicality and lend the film a richly textured feel. Extreme close-ups capture the texture of wooden stools, wet roof tiles, people’s skin, and make the world feel incredibly real and vibrant even as the narrative operates with its strange dream-logic.
“Jenkin’s unique cinematography immerses us in the hard lives of the two main characters and the difficulty of their labour.”
As the film continues, the texture of domestic life makes way for the physicality of fishing. It is crucial that the audience feels wet chains scraping against rusty metal, the fibres of ropes being stretched and pulled taut, battered nets trawling through open water, and fish guts being wrenched out. Jenkin’s unique cinematography immerses us in the hard lives of the two main characters and the difficulty of their labour.
Like with BAIT, the texture of the film images also contribute to a sense of time being out of joint. From the opening images, it feels like chronology is all mixed up and through the 1970s camera, it feels as if we’re watching ghosts trapped in the present. An early shot of water dripping upwards is subtly unnerving even when so brief it cannot really register. Before the men even set out to sea, they seem unmoored in time and trapped in a Cornish village that was left behind as the world marched on around it.
“Jenkin blends the British social realism of someone like Ken Loach with British folk horror to create a prism through which he can explore English decline.”
An early scene of Nick (George MacKay) entering a community food bank in a typical English village street gives a clear view of Jenkin’s preoccupation with old and abandoned places. The Cornish village feels economically adrift: the Post Office is now a food bank, the pub is empty, and Nick is literally plastering over the cracks in his terraced house. Like in ENYS MEN, Jenkin blends the British social realism of someone like Ken Loach with British folk horror to create a prism through which he can explore English decline. As the film goes on, it becomes a haunting exploration of Britain’s damaging nostalgia for imagined past glories.
Though haunting and beautifully shot, there’s something missing in how ROSE OF NEVADA handles the dilemma of the main characters. The film feels more narrative-driven than Jenkin’s previous two features, and suffers because his approach never gives much insight into the interiority of the two men. There’s an emotional disconnect between the film’s intellectual portrayal of a Britain unmoored by nostalgia and the actual feelings that the film evokes. For all the film’s sumptuous dreaminess, it also fades from memory like a dream after it’s ended, rather than lingering in the mind as BAIT did.