Jenkin delivers a tour-de-force time-slip fantasy, rugged and unkempt as the seas on which it’s set, but with a twinkling heart which floats well above the waterline.
Seven years after his seminal BAFTA winning debut Bait, Mark Jenkin returns to the Cornish coast with The Rose of Nevada, another analogue-driven tale of family, love and grief, but this time with a hauntingly sci-fi perspective.
Nick (George Mackay) is a struggling father, desperate to provide for his family in a once thriving fishing village. We see lingering shots of worn rope, moss and deep, vibrant rust, the treasures of a bygone age. Nick finds work on a fishing trawler which has mysteriously re-appeared in the harbour, thought to have been lost long ago. On it he meets Liam (Callum Turner), a rough sleeping out-of-towner eager to escape his old life, and the two become tangled in a twisting, time-jumping reality where nothing is as it once was, and yet everything is.
The cast provide rather nuanced and unassuming performances. Everyone apart from Mackay’s Nick is played with a strange apathy, even before the supernatural elements of the film take hold. Mackay is at first stiff-jawed and reserved, but we see him slip into an emotional journey, from a quiet desperation to a trance-like resolve. Turner on the hand feels brash and tempered, but again, he seems held back by something, restrained. Rosalind Eleazar gives a subtly playful performance as Liam’s ‘wife’, and she hold a real power in her expressions, so much learned in the raise of her eyebrows or the way she tilts her head. Francis Magee as Captain Murgey is suitably sea-drenched, and he does well as the crusty salty-dog figure, hungry for the profits of the catch.
The film is beautifully imagined by Jenkin. Shot in his usual way with a 16mm Bolex clockwork camera, the images carry a sandpaper graininess, with a colour saturation that shifts drastically through dreamlike stages, sometimes murky and dull, but sometimes pure technicolour, roses framed against the turquoise sea, or the crest of a hill, pure green and dazzled in sunlight. However, what ‘landscapes’ exist here are purely at the edges of our focus, as Jenkin drives a close fixed perspective with a 4:3 aspect ratio. Everything feels sucked in, claustrophobic, and even when we are out on the open sea, we feel trapped.
Then there is the sound design and score, also by Jenkin, which is brutal and thumping. The camera he uses cannot pick up sound, and this is added later, an obstacle which Jenkin uses to his advantage. This is a film that you hear as much as you see. Every crank of machinery, the slicing of fish guts, the change of a gear or the wind whistling through the trees is elevated, and the sequences aboard the fishing boat are terrifically intense, playing out more like scenes from a war film than anything else, with the score’s sharp creaks and drones often matching the hardware to heartbeat-quickening crescendos.
There are obvious allusions here to other films, not least The Lighthouse which set a modern benchmark for sailor-horror. There’s a bit of Jaws here too, three men going after a big catch etc. However, the film’s time jumping elements were mostly reminiscent of Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers, a film which too seamlessly moved amongst chronology, and with the same wispiness that Rose of Nevada has.
Jenkin’s work is instantly identifiable through its technical elements, and yet with this work he seems to be branching out in terms of both scale and genre, an exciting prospect for any film fan, for as it has been demonstrated, and Rose Of Nevada is no exception, Jenkin knows how to build tension with the simplest of assets, how to find beauty in the smallest details, and how to find heart in barren worlds.
Rose of Nevada will be released in the UK/Ireland in selected cinemas 24th April, with the US release on 19thJune.