Mark Jenkin (2025)
Through Bait (2019) and Enys Men (2022), Cornish filmmaker Mark Jenkin has acquired very high standing in British independent cinema. His Rose of Nevada is currently 100% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes (from 50 reviews). Because of the mostly dodgy acting in Bait, I passed on Enys Men but the success of both has enabled Jenkin to attract a much stronger cast to Rose of Nevada. It includes, in addition to Jenkin regulars Edward Rowe and Mary Woodvine (who is Jenkin’s partner), George MacKay, Callum Turner, Rosalind Eleazar and Adrian Rawlins. Set in a coastal village in Cornwall, Rose of Nevada features fishermen, ghosts, the distortion or erosion of local identity and community; it’s shot on 16mm film, using a hand-cranked Bolex camera to create a distinctive, textured aesthetic. All these things are trademarks of a writer-director who’s also his own cinematographer, editor and music composer. You certainly wouldn’t mistake a Mark Jenkin film as the work of anyone else, except perhaps a Mark Jenkin parodist.
Rose of Nevada takes place in what is a ghost village in more ways than one. In the present day, the Cornish fishing industry has dwindled and nearly died. The villagers are thin on the ground and there’s next to no one in the pub. One morning, the ‘Rose of Nevada’, a fishing vessel lost at sea in the 1990s, appears in the harbour. ‘She’s back,’ declares the boat’s owner, Mike (Edward Rowe), without much further expression of surprise. Soon, ‘Rose of Nevada’ is back at sea: old salt Murgey (Francis Magee) is the skipper; two younger men, Nick (George MacKay) and Liam (Callum Turner), complete the crew. Both badly need the work. Nick has a wife (Emily Daglish-Laine), a little daughter and a hole in the roof of the cottage where they live. Before Mike recruits him, Liam is sleeping rough. Nick’s next-door neighbours are Billy Richards (Adrian Rawlins) and his ailing wife (Mary Woodvine), who has never recovered from the suicide of their son, Luke: he should have been part of the crew of the title craft on her ill-fated voyage, didn’t turn up for work that day, and couldn’t live with his guilty conscience. Before the boat’s return to sea, Liam chats up the pub’s under-employed barmaid (Yana Penrose), whose mother is Tina (Rosalind Eleazar) and whose unreliable father, Alan, drowned when the ‘Rose of Nevada’ went down.
Murgey, Nick and Liam’s first expedition yields a surprisingly large catch of fish. When the boat comes back, though, what the two young fishermen find in the village and happening to them there is astonishing and inexplicable. The pub is packed out. On the site of what, in the mid-2020s, has become a food bank, stands a post office. Billy and his wife are thirty years younger, Tina too. She’s delighted to see Liam, whom she calls Alan. Mr and Mrs Richards address Nick as Luke. The cottage next door isn’t occupied by Nick’s wife and child. To keep assuring himself he’s not losing his mind, Nick keeps taking from his pocket the ‘We love you’ note they gave him before he set sail.
The images and noises of the fishing village – the barnacled timbers, the clanking harbour – resound (where Bait was optically challenging, Rose of Nevada can be sonically tough). Most of the performances are good, especially those of Callum Turner and Adrian Rawlins, although Edward Rowe remains a primitive performer. But Mark Jenkin’s supernaturalism and blatant political statement – the use of the former to deliver the latter – is an oppressive combination. The elderly Mrs Richards may be suffering from continuing grief and increasing dementia but her wild, wraith-like appearance immediately announces the weirdness in store. It doesn’t take long for the already socially unmoored Liam to accept his Alan identity. And Nick eventually submits to being Luke: in sacrificing his wife and child, he somehow becomes a member of the village’s vibrant community of yesteryear. How differently from the admiring British press I feel about the film is maybe best summed up as follows. On Rotten Tomatoes, the Radio Times reviewer, James Mottram, commends Rose of Nevada’s ‘political punch … the shot of a local Post Office replaced by a food bank … lands with real power’. Mark Jenkin describes emphatically the village’s economic and cultural decline. He stops just short of neon lights reading ‘DEPRIVED AREA’. For me, that shot of the post office where now the food bank is, lands with a clunk.
28 April 2026
