Festival Review: Rose of Nevada (dir. Mark Jenkin)
Plot in a nutshell
After a boat called the ‘Rose of Nevada’ mysteriously returns to port, empty, the locals who were knew the previous crew become anxious. Two would-be fishermen, Nick (George MacKay) and Liam (Callum Turner), decide to join the new captain (Francis Magee) on the ‘Rose of Nevada’ for a fishing expedition. When they return, they realize they’ve travelled back in time.
I was pulling all kinds of faces while watching Mark Jenkin’s Rose of Nevada. Disgusted, confused, in awe, creeped out, amused, beguiled; I went through so many motions it made me seasick. While I’m not sure I’ll be watching this one again any time soon, I know that I’ll be catching up with this director’s previous works - Bait (2019) and Enys Men (2022) - because Jenkin definitely has my undivided attention. He manages something that’s very hard to accomplish these days: originality. Proper, never-seen-or-felt-anything-like-it unique experience.
Shot in 16MM, and frantically edited with so many shots that have a discarded cutting-room floor feel to them, Rose of Nevada is all texture and atmosphere. It’s a film that’ll make you want to take a shower after you watch it, it shoves and spits its scenes at its audience with the bellicose attitude of a sea captain who’s on his fifth pint and has horrible breath. It’s an experience unlike any other, and one that - if you’re okay with grimy aesthetics - I highly recommend getting in a theatre, so that you can see and hear it all around you while it worms itself inside you.
The story itself is hard to follow but gets easier as you get used to the grueling vibe. And tucked away underneath its unpolished exterior, is a poignant remark on how the past can haunt the present, and how the passage of time is a construct that you eventually just have to give in to and accept. The gallery of characters are all memorable in their own ways but it’s the sea captain (Magee) and the local dockhand Mike (Edward Rowe) who chew the scenery with fantastically rugged accents and voices, and larger-than-life screen presence.
“The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness,” writes Joseph Conrad in his autobiography The Mirror of the Sea. Jenkin uses all sorts of tactile methods - distorted voice overs, discomforting close-ups, arthritic camera movements, sporadic editing, lots of shots of muddy boots and rusty metal - to create an affront to all your senses and turn Conrad’s quote into a reality as only cinema can. The sea, along with the primeval profession of fishing, is itself turned into a medieval force where all of time and space gets sucked into.
Rose of Nevada is my most pleasant surprise and my favorite new discovery of the festival so far. The more I think about it, the more astonishing it becomes.