The problem with things being lost at sea is that they have a habit of washing up years later. So it is that a fishing vessel, the Rose Of Nevada, mysteriously reappears in the harbour of a Cornish village, decades after going missing together with its crew – the strange event that sets in motion the latest offering from auteur Mark Jenkin.
Rose Of Nevada is, in many ways, at the centre of the Venn diagram of Jenkin’s two previous movies. Like Bait, it paints a realist portrait of rural deprivation; in this instance, though, there is no rising tide of gentrification, only evidence of a village that has been left high and dry by declining economic fortunes.
Forget quaint picture-postcard streets, Rick Stein restaurants and second homes – here, the once-thriving pub is deathly quiet and what was (we subsequently discover) the post office has now become a community food bank. Central characters Nick (George MacKay), a hard-up family man, and Liam (Callum Turner), a drifter, are desperate for some kind of work.
So far, so Ken Loach. But then the supernatural, uncanny elements of Enys Men begin to creep in and take hold – most significantly when the two recruits eagerly clamber aboard the ghost ship and go to sea with a rather clichéd salty seadog of a captain (Francis Magee). Only on their return, a couple of days later, do they realise they’ve gone back in time to before the boat was originally lost.
While Liam appears to accept being stuck in the past, as his new life offers greater promise than the old one he has left behind, Nick is deeply disturbed. As viewers, we share his bewilderment; never spoonfed explanation, we too are called on to make sense of what is happening. This is, Jenkins has admitted, a deliberate tactic to ensure our active engagement and treat us respectfully – and one that proves effective.
The footage, recorded on a hand-cranked 16mm Bolex camera, has an almost tangibly gritty, grainy, textural quality – the very antithesis of Hollywood gloss. This haunting, elegiac, defiantly enigmatic movie helps to cement Jenkin’s status as the creator of a distinctive visual language – and indeed as a filmmaker of considerable note.
Dir: Mark Jenkin (15, 114 mins)
Rose Of Nevada is in cinemas now.
words BEN WOOLHEAD
