Rose of Nevada
Rose of Nevada
Rose of Nevada (2025) 114 minutes rated 15 BFI/Film 4
Out on 24 April in UK and Irish cinemas, Mark Jenkin’s mysterious tale of a young man’s journey of discovery and identity through his life as a Cornish fisherman is played out with all the unhurried subtlety we have come to expect from this director, who has also given us the atmospheric ‘Bait’ and ‘Enys Men’. A Blu Ray release will follow in the summer.
Shots of the beautiful, wind-bitten and sea-scoured coastline stand in contrast to the neglected fishing village, with its deserted pubs and its all too necessary food bank. Why the fortunes of the village took a turn for the worse is not revealed but the re-appearance of a fishing smack, the Rose of Nevada, after its loss with all hands more than thirty years before, appears to offer a sign of hope for all here.
We see the haunted newcomer to the village Liam (Callum Turner-Eternity, Masters of the Air) loading up his small crate for a neighbour and her daughter to see them through another day. Rain is coming down heavily outside and dripping through a hole in their ceiling. Callum’s attempt to mend the hole ends with him falling through the roof, taking a larger portion of the ceiling with him. This significant motif will recur in the film, that of dropping through a hole as if he were dead weight.
Amidst the downpour, he escorts an elderly lady who is standing outside getting drenched, back into her house. She is clearly distressed and utters dire warnings about going out to sea short-handed.
Liam joins the crew of a tiny fishing smack with Skipper Murgey (Francis Magee-Kin, The Tourist) an old salt with the weather-beaten face and straggly beard you would expect and Nick (George MacKay-For Those In Peril, 17) his young fellow crewman who has a wife and child to support. After a fair to middling catch, in which the hard physical work of a fishing crew in these coldest, wettest conditions is exposed in unflinching detail, the crew return to the village to await their wages after the sale of the catch. Liam begins to notice that something scarcely believable has happened whilst at sea. They appear to have slipped back in time by over thirty years and the villagers are treating them as if they were the original, lost crew of the Rose of Nevada.
Their tough, insecure form of employment is well realized, from embarkation to trawling to netting, gutting and offloading the catch and the interminable wait for cash wages, the pittance it is. Liam’s face is a puzzled, bitter clump of rage throughout much of the story, as if his unspoken dubious past has almost caught up with him. Laconic crewmate Nick rarely shows his feelings even under heavy provocation from Liam, keeping all his feelings, positive of otherwise, for his desperately poor girlfriend and daughter.
The Rose of Nevada has all of the quiet, walking pace story telling we have come to expect from director Mark Jenkin and its science fiction premise does not distract from the very human drama taking place in this poverty-stricken region.
Scenester
26/3/26
Trailer; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bw371ui9cTk
