Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Mark Jenkin
Starring: George MacKay, Callum Turner, Francis Magee, Rosalind Eleazar, Mary Woodvine
Mark Jenkin's latest may be headlined by name actors in George MacKay and Callum Turner, but there is no compromising of his distinctive vision. As with his debut Bait, this is another lo-fi film set in Cornwall, shot on grainy 16mm and featuring outdated sound recording techniques. To employ the sort of fishing analogy Jenkin and his characters might relate to, Jenkin is very much the skipper of Rose of Nevada and MacKay and Turner have joined his crew to sail into uncertain waters.
Like his previous movie, Enys Men, Jenkin's third film might be mistaken for one of the more esoteric, horror-adjacent instalments of the classic British TV anthology series Play for Today, a feeling enhanced by its 4:3 aspect ratio. It's a story of time travel, and it is as impressively configured as Back to the Future in its storytelling (an alternate title for Jenkins' film might have been "Back to the Futarrr"). It's arguably Jenkin's most accessible work to date, but it still requires a commitment by the viewer to put the work in to piece together its clues.
"For every man at sea, there are five men on land relying on him," intones a character at one point. Rose of Nevada is set in a Cornish fishing village in which two local fishermen disappeared three decades earlier while out at sea aboard the titular trawler. It seems a lot more than 10 men were reliant on them, as the town has fallen into disrepair. Locals rely on a food bank, their homes succumb to leaky roofs, and the whole town is rusted and weather beaten. When the Rose of Nevada makes an unexpected reappearance in the harbour, its previous owner wastes no time in putting it back to work. A salty sea dog captain (Francis Magee) is recruited along with two young men: drifter Liam (Turner) and local Nick (MacKay), who badly needs the money to repair his home's leaky roof (the destruction of which is detailed in a brilliantly edited set piece).
Landing an unexpectedly massive haul of fish of the like the town hasn't seen in decades, it seems the Rose just might revive the community's fortunes. But when Liam and Nick return to land they find an unrecognisable village. Jenkin cleverly uses a bustling boozer to signify that we're back in the '90s, and there is nary a food bank in sight. The boys discover that they have somehow returned to 1993. Not only that, but everyone is convinced that they are the same young men who vanished with the Rose that year. While Liam goes along with the lie, bedding the woman who believes he is her husband (and whose daughter he had previously snogged as an adult in the present - yikes!), Nick is distraught, having left his own wife and child in the 2020s.
Every time travel movie is something of a headfuck, but only the badly made ones give you a headache when you try to make sense of them. Jenkin's narrative has been well thought out, and there are crumbs left throughout the film for us to follow. Follow these crumbs and you will find a movie that folds in on itself, with actions in the present affecting the past and vice versa.
There are horror elements like nightmare sequences and Mary Woodvine playing a senile old woman whose long white hair resembles a witch from a Chinese ghost story, but overall Rose of Nevada is closer in mood to a classic Twilight Zone episode. It owes a particular debt to 'Walking Distance', the episode in which a disaffected ad exec returns to his home town and finds it exactly as it was 30 years earlier. Rod Serling's episode was a warning against nostalgia, whereas Jenkin does little to suggest he wouldn't like to return to 1993 himself. This is a movie that is quietly mournful of what modern Britain has become, not in a far right Reform/Restore way (the village is multi-racial, both in the present and its past incarnation), but rather one that bemoans the destruction of small communities by a neoliberal system that would prefer to have an entire town's population working in an Amazon warehouse rather than pursuing their own individual ambitions.
Like the recent Eleanor the Great and Miroirs No. 3, Rose of Nevada is another movie that asks the question of whether going along with a lie can be justified if the illusion seems to have a positive effect. While Liam has no moral compunctions about maintaining his masquerade, Nick must decide whether to continue rebelling against the unusual hand fate has drawn for him or to embrace it. The locals' belief that Liam and Nick are the village's favourite sons is clearly revitalising a community that Nick knows will fall apart without their presence, and his dilemma is whether to allow the town's destruction by finding a way out or staying and allowing this Brigadoon to fulfil its potential. In British political terms, he must decide whether to remain or leave.
Rose of Nevada is in UK/ROI cinemas from April 24th.
