Rose of Nevada – first-look review

I came into this world eyes crossed, the small tip of my nose made bow. The moment my spine steadied and my words arrived, I took a seat on a low stool, cheeks squished by the chin rest, and looked right into the bowels of an iron machine. There, a small red boat floated across the sea, the sky melting into the water below. It was as if the world had lost its edges, the steadying bearings of reality engulfed by an inescapable vortex of blue. 

A strikingly similar image marks the halfway point of Mark Jenkin’s Rose of Nevada. The titular red and white fishing boat sits in the middle of the ocean as the water gently lulls its metal carcass, the placidity that surrounds it evoking a deep sense of dread. There was a time when folk believed the boat would never again bring fish home, but life has its mysteries and returns the Rose of Nevada to the harbour from where it left 30 years prior. 

When the boat went missing, Nick (George MacKay) was still a few years away from being born. By the time the strange vessel returns home, he has a small daughter, a wife he adores, and a leaking hole in his roof. Strapped for money in a dilapidated Cornish village where work is scarce, the young man takes a job as a helping hand on the Rose of Nevada alongside recently arrived Liam (Callum Turner) and hardened sea dog Murgey (Francis Magee). But something’s still not quite right about the boat, and while the harbour from which they sail is in the present, when they return a few days later with a bountiful catch, Nick and Liam find themselves in 1993 and inexplicably presumed by the village to be Luke and Alan – the Rose’s original deckhands. 

A Mark Jenkin film is a cracking cacophony of the analogue, coming off the gates whirring and spitting. As in Bait and Enys Men, the Cornish director shoots Rose of Nevada on 16mm in a wind-up Bolex, constructing the entire soundscape in post-production, including the haunting score he penned himself. His technique, although carrying a notable signature, remains somewhat unpredictable, a heightening and numbing of both mind and body that patiently pulls and pushes until it finds the exact point of catharsis. 

A crowning achievement of Jenkin’s work has been to find people whose faces mirror the refined textures of his films. Cracked noses and deep crevasses become a landscape as vast and complex as that of the director’s beloved home of Cornwall, with frequent collaborators Edward Rowe and Mary Woodvine beautifully embodying the filmmaker’s penchant for performers whose faces communicate intricate complexities without inflation. 

In this, MacKay proves a perfect addition to Jenkin’s roster, his Nick imbued with the actor’s natural grasp of the sorrows that come with empathy. Standing by the pooling water under the hole in his roof, Nick lovingly glances at his wee family, mesmerised by the gentle corners of his wife’s pale neck. The same intense eyes briefly gaze at the camera as the Rose of Nevada beats certain demise on the choppy waters yet again, filled not with the relief of survival, but the ache of a reunion postponed once more. Jenkin often rests his camera on the actor’s hands as his long, delicate fingers urgently grab at any semblance of firm ground, the pronounced veins running along his arms an ever-present reminder that, although this may seem a ghost story, warm blood pulsates through its veins. 

Juxtaposed to MacKay’s heart-shattering introspection, Turner’s boisterous counterpart performance grants Jenkin the foundation on which to anchor this almost biblical tale of sacrifice and loss, the fishing boat a Mount Moriah whose peak tests Nick’s faith in the good of the communal over the personal. It is an experience as moving as it is unnerving, and as the piercing screeching of iron rods announces the Rose of Nevada is to leave port once more, it is we the audience there to wave a pained goodbye, quietly stunned by the ethereal aura of Jenkin’s striking creation.