Director: Mark Jenkin
Writer: Mark Jenkin
Stars: George MacKay, Callum Turner
Synopsis: A mysterious boat returns to a village 30 years after vanishing. Two men join its crew hoping for better fortune. After one voyage, they find themselves transported back in time, mistaken for the original crew.
The lives of Mark Jenkin’s main men in his new film Rose of Nevada have yet to turn on their heads when Nick (George MacKay) climbs to the top of his home for a look at a dip in the roofing, one that is causing a distressing trickle of water to enter his kitchen uninvited. Of course, if we know anything about the repeatedly-donned “singular Cornish filmmaker,” it’s only a matter of time before that occurs. And indeed, the mind-warp begins in short order, not long after Nick plummets through said roofing and into his extremely humble abode bringing buckets of dirty rainwater and sopping drywall with him. It might actually occur right then and there, as the fall theoretically grounds Nick from up above to floor-level, though it certainly represents the transportation from one realm to another, quite fitting for what Jenkin has in store with his seventh feature. Named for the fishing boat at its core, it’s nothing if not the sort of magisterial, slippery oddity that the auteur has become regarded for, especially in his last three, most widely seen films. It’s one of the best films of the year, nevermind the fact that understanding its logic is an undertaking unto itself.
Yet it would be far less exquisite – and far less Jenkin-ish – were that not the case, and as he did with both 2019’s Bait and 2022’s Enys Men, he’s made a film that feels both wholly indebted to its sense of place and to its maker’s technical prowess. As he’s wont to do, Jenkin not only directed and wrote Rose of Nevada, but shot (on astonishing 16mm film in a wind-up Bolex), edited, co-mixed, and composed the film, and the fingerprints of a major visual artist riddle every frame with the severity of a Cornish mackerel’s stench clouding the room. Here, that’s a positive; in a home like Nick’s or a temporary resting place like the many that Liam (Callum Turner) tends to call home before currying favor with the captain of the aforementioned boat, to which Nick has also been assigned for the season, it might cause harm to nasal cavities. Plenty unfolds before two of the internet’s foremost English boyfriends – a fascinating twosome to appear in a Jenkin picture that hopefully leads to promising ticket returns if not outright raves once the film is released – meet up, yet what makes Jenkin’s work so special is how little one can truly say about what actually happens in it aside from repeating the film’s logline. One cause is how much individual interpretation each tale requires; another is the fact that spoiling anything would ruin the experience wholesale.
The rub is thus: Our devilishly handsome duo are boarding a vessel that, prior to its return to their local harbor, had been missing at sea for 30 years. How it managed to come back is known to few if none, but work is work, and these boys need it. After their first voyage, they discover that they’ve traveled back to 1993, a new reality in which the town is abuzz with foaming-at-the-mouth fishermen (policed and directed to their posts by the Jenkin regular Edward Rowe) and the people we once recognized now feel like strangers. Nick finds it all rather frightening – his wife and daughter are no longer where he last left them – while Liam deems it a fresh start. Their juxtaposed responses to what is a resoundingly baffling discovery propels the narrative forward (er, backward?) as time continues to bend, lives are forever altered, and memory is all that remains. Their skipper (Francis Magee) has no name, but also has a few, and routinely calls out “Home to Mother!” when the day is done. But what is now home, and who is now mother? It’s a peculiar test for our leading men, and one they take in strides that vary in length and in confidence.
Not only is Jenkin a master when it comes to making films of a unique sheen and energy, those with popping colors and grainy visions and sound that appears to be coming from a bedside radio, but that his stars aren’t distracting presences as a cause of their rising respective celebrities proves that he’s one hell of a director of actors, too. In the aftermath of Sam Mendes’ 1917, MacKay has found a niche in independent film, one where he can simultaneously serve as a proper leading man and as a chameleonic figure whose handsomeness is less distracting than it is curious. Turner, meanwhile, is sizzling both on and off the cinematic court – he is commonly referred to as “Mr. Dua Lipa,” a nod to his pop star partner – but transcends that appeal by becoming a dark, untrustworthy figure in Rose of Nevada that draws you in with his eyes just close enough in order for him to take a vampiric bite out of your neck. Both actors have rarely been better; that such elevated performances have come in a film by a director who has and will never require recognizable faces to make his movies worthwhile is nothing short of a big fat treat.
Mainstream audiences are bound to wish the pair appeared in a more conventional version of Rose of Nevada, one that played out like a straight-down-the-middle time travel mystery with a layer of darkness hanging over the proceedings. Which is a simpler way of noting that Jenkin is disinterested in making films for “multiplexes,” as it were. He’s not the sort of director that is bound to be considered as an option for a live-action Disney remake, nor is one who would bother considering them himself. In the same way that those remakes are often stripped of the zeal the original quantities possessed, a non-Jenkin iteration of Rose of Nevada would almost certainly lack its enigmatic nature, not to mention the unparalleled “touch” that he has already managed to make identifiable. When you see a film by Mark Jenkin, you know it’s his. Rose of Nevada is one, no mistake about it. It just happens to be operating at another level while retaining singularity through and through.
Rose of Nevada screened in the Main Slate at the 63rd New York Film Festival. 1-2 Special will release it in theaters next year.
