Review: Mark Jenkin’s ROSE OF NEVADA – You Won’t See Anything Else Like It This Year

Mark Jenkin’s Rose Of Nevada is an elliptical film that starts with a curious event and ends with a whole set of questions left dangling. Even the genre is unquantifiable. Is it a mystery? A ghost story? Or is it a time-travelling tale? In a sense, it’s all of these – yet none of them at all. This dreamlike film takes a concept that had the potential to have been commercial fodder and focuses it through the prism of Jenkin’s very specific, hand-crafted filmmaking.

When the boat, Rose Of Nevada, reappears at the small fishing village 30 years after it first went missing, it doesn’t seem to raise too many questions. It’s almost like its return was expected. The boat is crewed up with a new skipper (Francis Magee) and two newbies to the fishing way of life – down on his luck family man Nick (George MacKay) and the recently arrived-in-town drifter Liam (Callum Turner). The Rose Of Nevada sets off once again to trawl the sea for fish and they discover a rich bounty on their maiden voyage. When they return with a full haul, the town is livelier, the people are happy and… time seems to have slipped back to before the Rose Of Nevada went missing in 1993.

Adding to the mystery is the fact that Nick and Liam appear to have become two men who perished when the ship first disappeared. Nick is bereft that his wife and daughter no longer seem to exist, however Liam slips into an easy relationship with the wife of one of the missing men (Rosalind Eleazar). Do the town’s people know what is behind the mystery and are they simply happy to embrace the past, or is there something else afoot?

Jenkin refuses to offer up any easy answers – and some might even say that he offers no answers at all. Rose Of Nevada is a half-remembered memory of a film, a faded photograph of the past, where everyone can leave their own imprint.

Some people may find the lack of answers infuriating, but this isn’t a film for mass appeal. Much like the way Jenkin crafts his film with a hand-cranked Bollex camera, this is bespoke filmmaking that’s supposed to be appreciated for what it isn’t, as much as what it is. The post-sync sound and dialogue add to the off-kilter nature of Rose Of Nevada and that helps make it a very singular and incredibly immersive piece of filmmaking. You won’t find another film quite like it in cinemas this year, I can guarantee you that. Seek it out.