Rose of Nevada

Filmed on a 16mm Bolex camera with all sound constructed in postproduction, it looks, sounds, and feels like a newly rediscovered curio that a handful of people saw in the ‘70s and spent the next several decades insisting was an actual movie rather than a figment of their imagination. If you’ve seen Enys Men — and, statistically speaking, you almost certainly have not — you won’t be entirely at sea while diving into writer/director Mark Jenkin’s follow-up to that steeped-in-folklore oddity. If you haven’t, you might need a life jacket.

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Rose of Nevada has a similarly grainy aesthetic and detached approach to narrative, though it’s less inscrutable and more moodily dreamlike — though it does verge on the nightmarish for its two lead characters. But Jenkin, a kind of one-stop cinematic shop who also serves as cinematographer, editor, composer, and sound designer, clearly sees the physical and spiritual journey those characters go on as a nautical odyssey from which they and anyone bearing witness can earn their sea legs.

Thirty years after disappearing at sea, a small fishing boat called the Rose of Nevada reappears at a remote Cornish fishing village. The crew has not returned with it, having presumably perished, but the fact that the ship itself survived is seen as a good omen — and a chance to make some money. Not that the Rose herself is especially impressive: it can only accommodate a captain and two crewmen, who come in the form of drifter Liam (Callum Turner) and young father Nick (George MacKay). They decide to partake in the ship’s return voyage not because it’s a great opportunity, but rather because it’s the only opportunity in this sleepy town. “Only one thing worse than being at sea,” their grizzled captain (Francis Magee) tells them once they’re aboard: “not being at sea.”

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Oh, and there’s also time travel.

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The Rose doesn’t once again get lost at sea, as you might imagine, but rather has a successful, largely uneventful second maiden voyage. (Not entirely uneventful, however, as Nick finds a warning etched into his bedpost while unpacking the first night: “get off the boat now.”) It’s just that the village it returns to isn’t exactly the same one from which it departed. It’s still 1996, and everyone there thinks that Nick and Liam are different people — namely, two of the fishermen who originally disappeared along with the Rose of Nevada. Their attempts to disabuse the villagers of this notion are, of course, met with confusion and accusations that they’re the ones who’ve lost it, which gives Nick an idea: go out to sea again and return to the present.

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Whether that clever ploy is successful shan’t be revealed here, but suffice to say that it’s easier to be ensnared in a time-travel net than it is to escape from one. As ever, though, the journey matters more than the destination. Rose of Nevada is a trip in more ways than one, as well as a meditation on how past and present can merge in much the same way as the sea and sky do at the horizon line. To sail toward one is to sail toward the other, unsure of whether you’ll return — or, for some, even want to.

Oh, and there’s also time travel.

That’s certainly the question faced by Liam, who has no one waiting for him in the original timeline but a wife and child in the ‘90s. Something is better than nothing, and whether it’s strictly “real” — or should even exist in the first place — is immaterial. Turner and MacKay are both exceptional, and it’s largely thanks to their involvement that Rose of Nevada can expect a wider audience than any of Jenkin’s previous work; though he excels on a shoestring budget, the thought of him flexing his cinematic muscles with greater resources is appealing.

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You might have trouble making sense of the film, but Jenkin seems more interested in how it makes you feel than how easily you’re able to put it together. Rose of Nevada is confusing but compelling, like a dream you remember in bits and pieces throughout the day and only begin to understand once you’ve stopped trying to. Like the waves, it comes and goes and isn’t much concerned with whether or not you come with it — though you’ll have a better time going with the flow than you will swimming against the tide.