ROSE OF NEVADA
If you are willing to let the salt, grit and spray of Jenkin's film seep into your bones, this is his most disquieting work yet.
Directed by: Mark Jenkin
Starring: George MacKay, Callum Turner, Rosalind Eleazar, Francis Magee
Certificate: tbc
Released: 24 April 2026
Rating: 7/10
For over 20 years, working with non-existent budgets, 16mm Bolex cameras, hand-developed film and garage Foley, writer-editor-director-composer Mark Jenkin has documented a blasted, rusted, haunted corner of Cornwall as though mapping a lost continent. His 2019 breakthrough Bait felt like a film unearthed from some abandoned old tin mine; Enys Men (2023) was as eerie as a public information film directed by Nic Roeg. Now Rose of Nevada feels like a first attempt to bring his very local, artisanal vision to a wider audience.
The film opens amid flotsam and jetsam, barnacles, seaweed, shards of rusting metal and yards of torn nylon netting – degraded relics of the once-thriving Cornish fishing industry – before focusing on the arrival in harbour of the trawler Rose of Nevada, missing for thirty years. Two men join the crew of salty old seadog Captain Murgey: Nick, desperate to provide for his young family, and Liam, a drifter eager to escape his past. After a night away and a rapid induction in gutting sardines from "head to arsehole", they return to shore to find that everything has changed.
The decaying old pub is now thriving with scallies in Ian Brown t-shirts, the jukebox is playing baggy fellow travellers New Fast Automatic Daffodils, and the local foodbank is now a busy supermarket. It turns out they have somehow returned to 1993 – three years before Nick was born. Unlike the accommodating Liam, who blithely accepts the new girlfriend and child he's been returned to, Nick is terrified, and the film's second half tracks his mounting, unanswerable anxiety as the past solidifies around him and his family seems a distant memory.
It's Jenkin's first brush with commercial casting, pairing George MacKay (1917, The Beast) with Bond candidate Callum Turner, but it's Francis Magee – once a fisherman himself – as the grizzled skipper Murgey who steals the film. If Enys Men flirted with folk horror, Rose of Nevada is more of a moodily suggestive old sailor's yarn, and may frustrate more literal hauntologists. But if you are willing to let the salt, grit and spray of Jenkin's film seep into your bones, this is his most disquieting work yet.
