Rose of Nevada Review: At Sea With an Inescapable Past

Avant-garde filmmaker Mark Jenkin’s latest is a curio – strange and beguiling, a conversation piece – and a curiosity, its mysteries resisting clear resolution. The story of a ship that docks in a Cornish fishing village 30 years after it went missing, Rose of Nevada bobs between objet d’art and – due to its technical restraints and, well, artiness – film student production. 

Indeed, if you happened to go to film school in the right era, you probably shot your thesis on a vintage Bolex H16, Jenkin’s preferred camera. The weathered-feeling film grain suffuses Rose of Nevada with an out-of-time quality, and Jenkin fills the boxy, mostly static frame with further markers of age: images of rust, rot, peeling paint, rough-worn fishing boots. The boots walk into frame (we meet the man they’re attached to later), in a blocking choice we’ll see again and again. People and things come into frame; the camera stays put. There’s an apt metaphor there, or maybe just good advice for the impatient viewer: It’s best to meet Rose of Nevada on its own terms. 

The ghostly boat returns to a now-decimated community, where the work has long dried up, and the village pub is where they give away groceries to the misfortunate. That’s where the Rose’s owner Mike (Edward Rowe) meets up with single mom and widow Tina (Slow Horses’ Rosalind Eleazar), whose partner Alan went missing on the Rose so many years ago. Another village family is grappling with their own loss: Sixtysomething Billy Richards (Adrian Rawlins) and his wife (Mary Woodvine, who co-conceived the story and is Jenkin’s partner) still mourn son Luke, who also disappeared on the fishing boat. 

Regardless, the Rose is in remarkably good condition for having drifted unmanned for three decades, so Mike resolves to gather a new crew. Sturdy seafarer Murgey (Francis Magee, a marvelous character actor) captains, while the itinerant Liam (Callum Turner, Eternity) and family man Nick (George MacKay, 1917) join as deckhands. The two younger men are a study in contrasts: Liam seems a little shifty but has a wide smile he works to good effect, while Nick – honorable, devoted, cash-strapped, underwater – looks so stricken and stressed you worry he’ll give himself lockjaw from so much clenching. Both at dead ends, Liam and Nick have different motivations but the same hope – that a voyage on the Rose may turn their luck around.

Well, it does and it doesn’t. Given how plain the plot is, I won’t give away its biggest corkscrew. Only this: The fishing village they return to is much altered, and how each man comes to terms with that reveals much about his character. 

Rose of Nevada is too enigmatic to satisfy as a schematic mystery, and while it’s a ghost story of sorts, its limited jump scares don’t qualify it as a folk horror like Jenkin’s 2022 film Enys Men. Those aren’t grievances. Rose of Nevada is so uniquely its own thing, I strain for any comparison at all. Jenkin works the aforementioned technical restraints of his chosen vintage technology to extraordinary effect. The limited field of vision and the largely immobile frame can feel at times like he’s forcibly turning your head to insist where you turn your focus. If a character’s fingers are going to tap on a whiskey glass, Jenkin is going to make damn sure that’s where your attention goes, while a storm scene at sea is thrillingly rendered for all the chaos we can’t see, just out of frame. That same level of authorial control applies to the watery, immersive sound design – all assembled (including dialogue) in post-production by Jenkin. 

In addition to writing, directing, sound design, and original score, Jenkin also shot and edited the film. Not to diminish the contributions of the cast and crew, that’s about as singular a cinematic vision as you can get – even as that vision can sometimes feel as ungraspable as the sea that carries the Rose.

Rose of Nevada

2025, NR, 114 min. Directed by Mark Jenkin. Starring George MacKay, Callum Turner, Francis Magee, Edward Rowe, Rosalind Eleazar, Mary Woodvine, Adrian Rawlins, Mae Voogd, Yana Emily Penrose, Aria Balliah-Quinn.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.

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