Review of the Week: Rose of Nevada

(15, 114 mins, in cinemas from today)

Way down west, on the knobbly underside of the Cornish peninsula, in the ancient fishing community of Newlyn, is the studio where Mark Jenkin makes films. He does this in his own way, with his own equipment; a practical, hands-on, head-down approach to craft and graft that even the most barnacle-encrusted trawlerman must recognise and respect. 

In 2019, Jenkin crowned nearly 20 years of truly independent film-making with a Bafta for Bait, his black-and-white feature about conflict between tourists and locals on the Cornish peninsula. Then came 2022’s experimental folk horror Enys Man and now there’s Rose of Nevada, which manages to be Jenkin’s most accessible, audience-pleasing film to date, while staying entirely true to the methods and preoccupations which have long floated his artistic boat. 

The film’s title is the name of a fishing vessel which returns mysteriously to port after some 30 years lost at sea. The locals – represented mainly by Jenkin film regular Edward “The Kernow King” Rowe – see this as an auspicious omen. If the Rose of Nevada re-crews and gets a good haul in, maybe the luck of their once-thriving, now-struggling village will finally turn? 

To that end, two inexperienced yet strapping deckhands are recruited: Nick, a young father who needs the money to repair the leaky roof on his cottage, and Liam, a new-to-the-village chancer with an eye for the ladies. Both are played by contemporary Brit-flick matinee idols: George MacKay and Callum Turner respectively. 

Once aboard, the Rose of Nevada’s crew braces for bad weather, but when the storm does come, it carries them not further out to sea, but back in time, to when the pubs were full, the raves were free and shell suits in non-breathable fabrics were the height of menswear chic.

It’s a plot that’s pleasingly reminiscent of such 80s and 90s Hollywood time-travel classics as Groundhog Day and Back To The Future, while also revealing a more deeply resonant and relevant truth about how gentrification plays out in modern Britain. Jenkin’s distinctive sound-recording practice – no sound is recorded live; instead the actors re-voice their dialogue during the edit – is, in this context, eerily evocative, creating a subtle, out-of-sync sensation. This is what it feels like when a place changes faster than the people who live there. 

Nick’s story in particular gives an affecting illustration of the particular disorientation that results when a person becomes alienated from the very community that made them. And of the loneliness that comes with a livelihood that separates you from the very loved ones you’re working so hard to support. What if you drift so far that you can never come home again? And what of the people who are always left behind on shore, looking out to the distant horizon and hoping for your return?

There have been films made about the fishing life before, like 2000’s Massachusetts-set disaster drama The Perfect Storm, in which director Wolfgang Petersen used big studio budgets to create the awesome spectacle of 100ft-high storm waves bearing down on a 40ft-high boat. But whereas that film cast George Clooney – utterly implausibly – as a commercial swordfishing captain, in this film actor Francis Magee plays “Murgey” as the saltiest of old sea dogs, with an authenticity derived from the eight years he spent working on a trawler before landing a part in EastEnders. 

Rose of Nevada may lack the CGI effects, but Jenkin’s layered sound design is impressively effective in the action scenes. In other instances, his use of 16mm film in a Bolex clockwork camera necessitates a preference for close-ups over scene-setting wide shots, slowing the pace to encourage a contemplative focus on detail and texture. It’s in the low boom of water hitting hull, underneath the rumble of the engine; the saturated orange of the rusted anchor chains; the green of the fishing nets; the wet moss growing around the graffitied council signs. 

Maybe Hollywood’s siren call will yet tempt Jenkin across the Atlantic, in search of those two most slippery fishes, fame and fortune. Maybe he’ll get hired to direct the next instalment of the Marvel Cinematic Universe on 16mm film, with a vintage, hand-cranked Bolex camera. If so, we’ll still have Rose of Nevada. A shimmering moment of meaning to hold on to briefly, before it wriggles out of your grasp and flops back into the mysterious deep.

Ellen E Jones is the Nerve’s film critic. A writer and broadcaster, her book Screen Deep: How Film and TV Can Solve Racism and Save the World (Faber) won the Kraszna-Krausz Prize. She co-hosts the BBC’s flagship film and TV programme, Screenshot, on BBC Radio 4, and won the Broadcasting Press Guild’s Presenter of The Year, 2025.