With his fourth movie, Cornish director Mark Jenkin fuses his earlier two outings right into a hypnotic examine of psychological disintegration that, although its focus is a seemingly on a regular basis particular person confronted by their demons in solitude (like his final movie), makes a broader level (just like the one earlier than) about happier instances within the British south-west’s financial historical past. To make that clearer, gentrification was the topic of his 2019 arthouse hit Bait, and creepy folklore figured strongly in his 2022 Cannes entry Enys Men. By distinction, Rose of Nevada is way more of an out-and-out style piece than both, drifting nearer to horror than the director ever has earlier than, whereas retaining his haunting, glitchy, hand-distressed type, the cinematic equal of artist Francis Bacon’s distorted face work.
It’s additionally Jenkin’s first brush with business casting, pairing the established George McKay with up-and-comer Callum Turner, at present starring on this yr’s silly-season Bond rumors. Both actors have a gnomic high quality that fits a disturbing, ambiguous movie wherein nothing could be recognized for positive, and no one is ever fairly who they appear to be.
The movie begins with photos of flotsam and jetsam, barnacles, seaweed, shards of eroded steel and yards of torn nylon netting; all degraded relics of the once-thriving Cornish fishing trade. These photos serve to summon up a ghost, the Rose of Nevada, a fishing boat that has returned, mysteriously, as readily because it disappeared 30 years earlier than. A neighborhood businessman decides, simply as mysteriously, that it should return out to sea, and begins to search for a neighborhood crew, recruiting a grizzled previous sea salt (Francis Magee) as skipper.
The skipper wants two crewmen, who develop into Nick (McKay) and Liam (Turner). Nick is a younger father, struggling to make ends meet in his tumbledown house and feeding his household from foodbank donations. His aged neighbor, Mr. Richards, misplaced his son in tragic circumstances, from which his spouse (Mary Woodvine), now affected by dementia, has by no means recovered. “My boy’s coming back,” she tells (or warns?) Nick, however Mr. Richards brushes it off. “Sometimes she gets the past and present mixed up,” he says, one other omen of unhealthy issues to come back. In distinction to Nick, the itinerant Liam is extra of a Jack the Lad, and his floating ethical compass can be examined within the drama that unfolds.
The three got down to sea and the voyage is successful — Jenkin actually lands the visceral thrill of fishing — and the boys return house elated, with money in hand. But whereas they’ve been away, one thing has modified. The city is busier than normal, and the pub is full, with paper notes and long-annulled cash altering fingers. Liam is mistaken by a single mom for the daddy of her baby, and cheerfully goes together with it, and after discovering his house empty, Nick is taken in by the Richards — now, spookily, trying a lot, a lot youthful — who insist he’s their useless son. Unlike Liam, Nick is freaked out, particularly when a neighborhood newspaper reveals that the yr is 1993, three years earlier than he was born.
What is happening? Strap in. Like the ship it’s named after, Rose of Nevada sails spherical in circles, making a Möbius strip like Roman Polanski’s eerie 1976 chiller The Tenant, which this very a lot resembles. An uncanny temper is there from the beginning, heightened by some very arch performances — reminiscent of Jenkin’s penchant for non-synch dialogue — and a few slightly distracting old-age make-up, which is later leavened by the flashback scenes. Though it’d look like a flaw, it does play into the story’s strangeness, as Nick begins to wonder if the entire state of affairs is an elaborate prank.
But it’s not; it’s taking place. On the floor, Rose of Nevada is a couple of man taking place, underneath stress to supply for his spouse and daughter. On a deeper stage, although, the movie is an exploration of time, a trippy interpretation of the phrase “ghost town”, which is thrown round a lot in as we speak’s post-industrial landscapes. Once it will get going, there aren’t many clues as what all of it means, or what’s actual and what’s fantasy. But it might be telling that, at one level, Christopher Walken pops up on TV in David Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone (1983), a movie in regards to the malleability of the long run. Rose of Nevada is perhaps its reverse; when there’s no future, what else is there to do however endlessly rewrite the previous?
Title: Rose of Nevada
Festival: Venice (Orizzonti Competition)
Director/screenwriter: Mark Jenkin
Cast: George MacKay, Callum Turner, Francis Magee, Edward Rowe, Rosalind Eleazar, Mary Woodvine
Sales agent: Protagonist
Running time: 1 hr 54 minutes