The Brooklyn Rail

A rush of longing, desperation, and bewilderment immediately came over me while watching Mark Jenkin’s Rose of Nevada (2025). Such emotion was only highlighted by the movie’s crackling 16 mm film and distinct soundscape, the hallmarks of Jenkin’s style, previously most prominently featured in Bait (2019) and Enys Men (2022). Rose of Nevada prioritizes the sentiment of its characters while never succumbing to being a movie that wants its viewers to “solve” its puzzle. In that way, the film’s lo-fi science-fiction plot takes one by surprise. It challenges us to give in to its immersive atmosphere and feelings of regret and how we value our past in contrast with our present.

Set in an old Cornish coastal town, Rose of Nevada takes its name from an old fishing ship that sank during a tragic accident thirty years ago, involving three local fishermen. In the present day, this tragedy still hangs over the town—particularly, Nick Dyer (George MacKay), Liam (Callum Turner), and ship captain Murgey (Francis Magee). One day, another local fisherman sees Rose of Nevada miraculously tied up on the dock. Soon, the tragedy of the town’s past comes rushing back to him. Is this a vicarious Lord Jim-esque chance at redemption for Nick and the ghosts of the fishermen who drowned, or is this some kind of dark magic trick?

While the premise of the film suggests a mainstream, time-traveling, ghost-ship movie that leads its central character to a reckoning with himself, what Jenkin concocts is much more elusive and uncompromising. The boat becomes a vessel to Nick’s own past, three years before his birth, through the life of one of the sailors who drowned. But Nick doesn’t see this as a chance to start over. Instead, it becomes a prisoner’s dilemma scenario. In the film’s original timeline, Nick does not have an ideal life, but he sees it as a satisfactory one, with a wife and family he loves. As dreary, difficult, and perhaps unfulfilled as it may seem, he desperately tries to claw back to it.

Jenkin’s use of Bolex 16 mm camerawork gives an aged and rustic look to the film that perfectly complements its Cornish working-class setting. Jenkin fixates his camera on so many particular objects of fascination—the buoys, the chains, anchors, ceiling cracks, fragments of drywall, beer, rain, wood, carved words—that immerse us in the fabric of the movie’s setting. What’s even more distinct is his startlingly clear and curt level of sound in relation to image. Jenkin achieves the explosive soundscapes of his films—which often seem like they are at war with the image, literally fighting for dominance in both effect and style—via a unique and intentional postproduction process.

He is as much a filmmaker as a sound artist, doing all the postproduction sound work for his movies in his personal foley studio. For footsteps, for example, he says, “I’ve got a bit of fake floor that’s above the concrete floor in my studio, and I do all the footsteps on there. I’ve got a small wooden table that I use on the wooden floor to do any door sounds, chairs, tables, that sort of thing.” When a door closes in his films, it sounds and feels like a gunshot. When water moves in drips or ripples, it’s like each drop is the only sound in an otherwise soundproof room. Sizzles, crackles, thumps, and creaks are so contrasted with a deafening silence—it gives the sensation of a horror movie. While his previous feature, Enys Men, utilizes a similar sound style, Rose of Nevada uses sound in a different and more dramatically tragic manner. For Nick, these sounds—the drips on his cottage’s leaking roof, the door creaking, the kettle whistling, the sounds of the sea, and the rasping of the anchor and wooden floorboards of the boat—are all part of the memory of tragedy and home and what haunts him.

George MacKay is perfectly cast here, exhibiting the wild-eyed uneasiness he showed in both 1917 and Femme to great effect in his confusion seeing his past envelop his present. His demeanor towards his family and wife comes across as both disquieted and frustratingly resistant to accepting his reality. His performance is even more potent opposite Callum Turner, whose character Liam is more than happy to accept being stranded in the past. This dichotomy creates a potently frustrating situation in the film that causes both unrelenting unease and tension. Past and present, the struggle for redemption and willing passivity generate a friction that creates unease throughout the film. The time-loop narrative traps us, along with the protagonists, in an inescapable dimension, detached from the film’s initial reality. As Nick boards the boat for his fishing excursion each day, we wait along with him in tense anticipation to see if it will dock back in his original timeline.

What makes Rose of Nevada spellbinding in its execution is the way its imagery and sound are in a constant battle for supremacy of emotion and feeling. Its aged and rustic landscape tussles with the echoing, hypnotic sounds of the wood, the steel, the rope, and the water to create a sensation of coastal working-class life that Nick becomes immersed and unsettled in. A chance at redemption becomes a monotonous reliving of a past he had already let go of. The mysterious reappearance of the boat doesn’t offer him a new life as much as it does a lesson about what he could lose. Jenkin doesn’t make it clear whether this is a gift or a curse—only that it is a cosmically rare chance to do things differently. But at what cost? Ultimately, Rose of Nevada is a confoundingly intoxicating parable, rich with conflicting feelings.