Rose of Nevada is a twisty ghost story of a time travel movie that explores Mark Jenkin’s continued love affair with the Cornish country that he was raised; intent on telling their own stories. 30 years after vanishing – a boat arrives in a small fishing village – empty but with remnants of the past; photos of loved ones and hats that people used to wear. The new crew – George McKay’s Nick and Callum Turner’s Liam board it – only to find themselves transported back in time to the early 90s and the peak of the thriving fishing village; mistaken for the original crew with seemingly no way to get home.
Capturing the spirit of 80s independent cinema with charm and a ghost narrative that works in its favour; the film focuses on a society needing to move on but never really being able to do so – stuck in the past; a metaphor for the current state of South West provinces like Cornwall and Devon today. The film is rhythmic and repetitive whilst never being dull – we settle into the daily routine of Nick and Callum’s fishing trips be that in the 90s or the present day and the clanking vibes of being at sea are really captured; you buy both men as fishermen and you buy the atmosphere as kind of the closest Jenkin has come yet to recreating say, gothic horror in the past. Once stranded in the past Nick and Callum’s lives are uprooted – Nick has a connection to the present, but Callum quickly embraces his new life- and Nick discovers a way in which something is wrong from the off – the village – now deserted and empty, is crowded and full of life. People are in the pub happy, dancing and engaged – it’s something that Nick knows cannot be.
I love how Rose of Nevada keeps its structure relatively lowkey and avoids being a typical big-stakes time travel narrative and instead becomes big because of how small the stakes are – it’s just two men, trapped out of time, with seemingly no way to return. It becomes a ghost story with a metaphorical framework – could we not live as we did before, just several years earlier? There are differences of course but there are differences then – the remote village is not quite the technological beacon of present day London – it feels off the grid before and that the townsfolk are living in the past, in the 90s – when times were better and the fishing was current. It’s looser than Enys Men and connects to the cultural structure of Bait, a study on modern Cornish identity through the framework of the past. Jenkin exists to tell those stories: far too many filmmakers today would use the locals of the South West as backdrop for say, main characters moving out from London to the capital, but it’s here they feel wholly surrounded in Cornwall to the point you can’t imagine them anywhere else: it’s something that is lacking across the board to the point where only a select few filmmakers like Steven Knight and Ken Loach are capable of recreating this unique selling point of life outside of the big cities; or outside of London.
McKay and Turner are both naturalistic in their roles and embracing the life already written – Rosalid Eleazar able to foil Turner superbly both in the past and present, and Francis Magee’s experienced, veteran captain adds a no-nonsense approach to the plot and just gets on with life as he sees it – what will be will be. This is akin to say, The Leftovers – if you were looking at the mystery as a riddle to be solved you’re looking in the wrong place – it instead works as a movie that’s never quite clear about whether its characters are alive or dead; instead watching Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone. It’s the characters’ story about whether they exist in that world watching Cornwall’s economics depart around them, a folk horror with a gripping commentary as much as a folk horror itself. There are no witches, no spirits, no supernatural force – but that doesn’t stop Mark Jenkin giving us one of the best films since The Wicker Man.
The film feels like it exists in a world of post Brexit Cornwall, a case study of its ramifications – this is a ghost story where Cornwall itself is a ghost – the county voted predominantly to leave the European Union and then had everything that they had before removed one by one.