After Bait and Enys Men, Mark Jenkin continues his one-man quest to turn Cornwall into modern Britain’s most haunted place with Rose of Nevada, a strange and pessimistic ghost story about the death of the county’s local non-tourist economy and the impossibility of ever truly bringing it back. Keeping his crackly 16mm aesthetic and abrasive, looping soundscapes, this is also his most accessible effort yet, thanks in no small part to the presence of some actual name-brand leads in the forms of George Mackay and Mr Dua Lipa himself, Callum Turner.
Mackay and Turner play Nick and Liam, two financially hard-up guys (Nick is using a food bank to feed his family, Liam is fully sleeping rough) in a small Cornwall town who take on a rare fishing gig to get some cash in their pockets. Their boat is the Rose of Nevada, a seemingly cursed vessel that, back in the ‘90s, played host to a disastrous trip that killed a deckhand called Alan and caused his usual shipmate Luke, who this time stayed home, to commit suicide out of guilt. Led by salty captain – and possible devil – Murgey (Francis Magee), the pair set out to sea, and bring in a fair haul.
Yet, when they get back, it’s not to 2025. Instead, they arrive in 1993, the year of the original fateful trip, with Liam appearing to the ‘90s townsfolk as Alan and Nick mistaken for Luke. Just like Palm Springs did with the time loop genre back in 2020, the first refreshing thing Rose of Nevada does is have two people stuck in this chronological nightmare, able to play off of each other. Liam embraces his newfound Alan-hood – Alan had the better life, with a roof over his head and a wife and daughter, and Liam even seems to be a better man than the one he’s replaced – but Nick is desperate to get back to the present, missing his own family and haunted by strange, radio-static dreams.
Mackay and Turner are both compelling as a lead duo, though Mackay does make the stronger leap into Jenkin’s specific, ultra-idiosyncratic style, managing to make his performance as unstuck in time as his character, another striking achievement in a career just packed with them. Rosalind Eleazar also makes a fine addition to the Jenkin ensemble as the fiery and guarded – but loving – woman who believes Liam to be Alan, aka her husband, and his Cornish regulars remain good value.
It’s all shot with Jenkin’s typical fine-grain style – the frames filled with the viscerally nautical, from rotten wood to slick fish flesh to endless rust – and soundtracked by the scrapingly eerie soundscapes he’s become known for. Rose of Nevada starts slow, but really never stops building, getting exponentially more unnerving as it goes. Is it really time travel? Is it purgatory? Or is it all a metaphor for the psychological cycles and traps of the suicidal mind? Feasibly, it’s all of the above. Whichever way I looked at it, it freaked me the hell out.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 