‘Rose of Nevada’

Bait,​ Mark Jenkin’s first feature film, earned him the Bafta for best newcomer in 2020. Jenkin had been making short films for seventeen years by then. Most of them had been filmed with old cameras of one kind or another – super 8, 16 mm – and some had frames with rounded corners, which placed them somewhere between generations-old home movie and rediscovered newsreel footage. Jenkin, who lives in Cornwall and works out of a studio in a converted primary school in Newlyn, is well enough known for his fascination with celluloid that – as he explains in his 23-minute documentary A Dog Called Discord (2023) – he has accumulated related gifts: old film stock, splicers, projectors, hand-cranked cameras. Sometimes he uses film that’s out of date (the documentary shows footage he made with a roll of Tri-X that expired in 1960) and sometimes the apparently unwanted film he’s been given will turn out to have been exposed but never processed, leaving Jenkin to run it through chemicals and travel through time, bringing to life whatever ancient moments were recorded by its anonymous original owner. In these cases he finds, in his own description, ‘the light from that moment in time, resurrected on a piece of plastic’.

Time is embedded in the way Jenkin works – not just the occasional resurrection but the hand-cranked cameras and hand-processed film. His method involves hearing the fractions of a second ticking by as he shoots. He measures time and light as he exposes the film, time and temperature when he develops it himself, time and shape as he edits it – and that’s all before he’s even added sound, which he synchronises later. The 16 mm hand-cranked Bolex camera he has used for all three of his feature films can only shoot one 28-second take at a time. He tries not to waste it: in 2012 Jenkin wrote himself a ‘manifesto’, promising not to shoot more than three minutes for every minute in the final film – a strict ratio rarely embraced since Hitchcock.

If this sounds somewhat fetishistic (the critic Jonathan Romney has described Jenkin as ‘radically artisanal’), he has proven each time that the form serves the content. In Bait he depicts a vanishing fishermen’s world in black and white, with foreboding rather than nostalgia – he makes it look like the past predicting the future. In Enys Men (2022) the flickering film itself feels like a haunting. As the saturated colour footage judders into horror, its natural uncanniness is emphasised to terrifying effect. Jenkin’s films feel less made than found; this is especially apt in the case of his third feature, Rose of Nevada.

In a Cornish fishing village, a trawler lost at sea thirty years ago mysteriously reappears in the harbour. Its name plate is a little rusted, but otherwise Rose of Nevada is much as it was: a red baseball cap belonging to one of the disappeared is still there and a photo of a crew member’s girlfriend is sellotaped to the wall by one of the bunks. That girlfriend, now a widow (Rosalind Eleazer), is asked by the former owner of the boat to give her blessing to a new excursion. The village needs it: its once thriving pub is desolate, its post office has become a food bank. The place is marked by tragedy and austerity. The owner, Mike (Edward Rowe), attempts a superstitious refurbishment: he removes the name plate with a crowbar. As he’s working the noise attracts two people, a drifter with a London accent (Callum Turner) and a bearded, sun-worn seaman, both of whom, like the boat, have appeared out of nowhere.

‘Need a skipper?’ the sailor asks. ‘Do I know you?’ Mike says. ‘Do ya?’ ‘Maybe.’ In less desperate times this unsettling exchange might give a person pause, but Mike is determined. The skipper is recruited and the drifter – his name may be Liam – signs up to join the crew.

They are one man short. That place goes to Nick (George MacKay), as he thinks he’s called, who leaves his beloved wife and young daughter for a couple of days at sea in order to make some much needed cash. As he leaves the house he is confronted by his neighbour in the alley where he lives. We’ve met Mrs Richards (Mary Woodvine) before – she is a lugubrious-looking old woman with long white hair who stands outside her house in a nightie and bare feet. We assume she must have dementia – Nick and his wife occasionally have to call for her husband and take her indoors. This time as Nick turns from his front door she says: ‘That boat was lost. You remember. She went down short-handed, didn’t she? You let ’em down, you never forgived yourself. My beautiful boy.’ Mrs Richards reaches out a hand to touch his face. ‘Don’t do it to us again. Me and your dad can’t go through it again.’ Nick brushes her hand away – she doesn’t know what she’s talking about, the gesture suggests – and gets on the boat. There, he sees a message scratched into the wood beside his bunk: ‘Get off the boat now.’ As soon as they set off, it disappears.

The trawl is a success. The boys are set to return with a boat full of fish. Watching the film, you brace yourself for a storm or some other tragedy that will prevent their arrival. It never happens: they reach the harbour and all seems well. Except that – at more or less exactly the halfway mark of the film’s running time – they have disembarked thirty years earlier. From that moment on, almost everything is strange and painful. Billed as a film about time travel, Rose of Nevada is really about the ravages and relatives of time itself – memory, grief, desire, decay and what pins us to the present.

For the first time, Jenkin has cast high-profile mainstream actors alongside his usual troupe. MacKay, who played the lead in Sam Mendes’s First World War film 1917, is particularly stark as a man who becomes trapped in time. Turner is uncomfortably convincing as the opportunistic stranger, and loyal Jenkin performers Woodvine, Rowe and Mae Voogd are, as ever, low-key and riveting to watch. Jenkin is writer, director, cinematographer, editor, composer and sound designer. In this case he has based the script on a story devised with Woodvine, his partner and regular collaborator, and has bulked up his crew with students from Falmouth University, where he teaches.

One of Jenkin’s signatures is that his establishing shots are textural. He cuts in close straight away. Here we are introduced to the territory with rusted mooring rings and pieces of wreck wood, details in rope and netting, chalky rocks and piebald moss, primary blue and red paint over metal. You can feel – almost smell – the maritime scene. These shots prime you for what Jenkin wants to show you of everyday beauty: a patterned curtain slowly drawn against the light, a tender glance at a sleeping face. When the men are at sea, he films the blue-green water gloriously. The red and black boat with foam at its base, the men’s yellow waterproofs moving in the moonlight, the many kinds of fish: everything is rich. The odd flare of reddish sunlight flashes the film. The atmosphere is odd and the footage is mesmerising.

Jenkin is economical in his grammar – in Bait, for instance, a plot development is suggested by the twitching of a rope tied to a lobster trap. Like his textures, his protagonists are often filmed in close-up, so that their faces fill the screen. You might (if you were pretentious enough) call it the Falconetti effect: MacKay’s expressive features and shaved head seem deliberately to recall the actor’s face in Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc. In all Jenkin’s films, being this close to the bare truth of things makes the shocks, when they come, brutally intimate.

When Nick returns home he finds his house up for sale and his neighbours, Mr and Mrs Richards, expecting him for tea. This younger version of the couple takes him to be their son, Luke. I almost called him their ‘lost’ son Luke, but in this timeframe he is not yet lost. Still, if he’s alive, where is Luke? Why has he left room for Nick to take his place? Struggling to prove his identity, Nick blurts out that he was born in 1996. He grabs a newspaper lying in their living room. The date is 1993.

Meanwhile, Liam is mistaken for Alan, the husband of Tina, who we met at the start. He’s a chancer: since he has no more committed role to play in life, Liam adopts the one offered and insinuates himself into Tina’s home without correcting her mistake. According to those in the village, the fishermen have been gone three years. Now they’re here, Liam and Nick find themselves inhabiting the lives of the men they think have been lost at sea. If they take the boat out again, can they rewrite the past?

In Enys Men, Woodvine plays a botanist who’s researching freakish flowers that have erupted on a Cornish cliff. The cottage where she’s staying flickers between quaintness and dereliction. It’s never clear whether the film is flashing forward or back, whether the ghosts are local or all her own. What tragedies has she brought with her to this isolated place? Does the horror stem from the mystic pull of the rock outside her cottage or are her personal losses registering in monstrous ways? She develops a wound that either echoes or prefigures a terrible death. When she goes for a walk she finds a plaque commemorating a lifeboat: ‘all hands lost’.

Picking up where Enys Men left off, the scrambled time in Rose of Nevada throws into question the characters’ relationships with one another, their surroundings, themselves. How do we know that the scenes we saw first aren’t fantasies and the second half of the film the characters’ reality? What if Luke/Nick has materialised as a result of the Richards’ longing for his return? ‘She thinks you’re someone else!’ Nick tells Liam, berating him for sleeping with Tina. ‘I am someone else,’ he replies. No one knows themselves.

It’s through Nick/Luke that we feel the eerie trap most. Not only is he desperate to get back to his wife and child but he knows, with all the force of a father’s heart, what will happen to the Richards’ son. In the more recent timeframe, when Nick was their neighbour and they were a sad elderly couple, he had his own family to care for and no need to consider their grief. Now that he stands in the place of the person they are about to lose, he notes their love and its corollary: the fact that they will never recover. Mrs Richards’s gaze shines on him with long-held indulgence; it’s as if a visit to the past is the only way to feel the pain of others.