The Beautifully Handcrafted Rose of Nevada Is a Ghost Story Like No Other

The English director Mark Jenkin works a bit like a local artisan from another era. Filming in and around his native Cornwall, he shoots his pictures himself on a 16mm Bolex, the kind of camera that might have been used by film students decades ago and that produces tactile, slightly grainy images. He also edits the movies himself, and records his sound later, layering in dialogue and effects and music (sometimes composed by himself) with an austere, handcrafted precision. This gives Jenkin’s work a certain timelessness, as if it belongs to the past but not to any specific period of the past. True, such an old-fashioned approach could feel performative, like an unusually well executed Instagram filter. But Jenkin’s style ties directly to his subjects and his expressive philosophy. His latest, Rose of Nevada — which stars two name actors, Callum Turner and George MacKay, and opens in New York today after doing the festival rounds — has the beguiling simplicity of a fable and the captivating textures of a dream. It stays with you like an unexpected and unanswerable question.

Jenkin privileges atmosphere through the collection of minute, sometimes abstract details. Set in a sparsely populated and depressed fishing village, Rose of Nevada opens with the unexpected return of the empty boat of the title, thought lost decades ago. Its arrival is announced by close-ups of barnacles, of rusty edges on ancient metal, of curious plant growth and moldy, tangled coils of black rope, as if its return was just part of a broader natural order. The Rose of Nevada clearly has a tragic history, which perhaps explains the psychological paralysis of the few remaining townsfolk. But it’s here, and so it must set off on a new fishing voyage.

Joining the journey, almost as if they were pulled towards it, are Nick (MacKay), a downcast man who needs money and seems incapable of meeting his young family’s most basic needs, and a drifter, Liam (Turner), whom we first see running down a road as if he were fleeing something. Both men are alienated from their environs, though for different reasons: MacKay conveys Nick’s quiet awkwardness well, and Turner has a charming, freewheeling energy that suggests he’s up for anything. When they return from the fishing expedition, however, the two men find that they’ve transported back several decades in time, and they’re mistaken for — or rather, they appear to be inhabiting the bodies of — two young deckhands who died long ago. Now that it’s the 1990s again, the fishing village is thriving, its local pub crowded with people and blaring pop. Nick and Liam see the younger, happy versions of the broken townspeople they’d left behind. Liam (now known as Alan) suddenly has a family, and Nick (now known as Luke) suddenly has parents. It’s almost as if the young men have been offered to the harvest gods as a sacrifice. And it’s worked.

So, it’s a ghost story, and a time travel story, and a folk tale, and something of a kitchen sink drama, but it’s also none of these things, really, and that’s where Jenkin’s formal gambits come in. His filmmaking has a lovely, homespun directness. We can feel scenes and moments being constructed, which fixes our attention on seemingly simple exchanges. An example: Early on, we see Nick hand his daughter a candy. Other filmmakers might shoot such a scene in a quick, offhand manner to mask its emotional weight, but Jenkin goes in the opposite direction, shooting everything in relative close-up and cutting the action to both extend and clarify it: We see Nick pull the candy out of its box, we cut to the girl receiving the candy, we see his wife see the girl, we cut to the wife taking the candy, we cut to a close-up of her unwrapping it, we cut to the girl getting the candy back, and we see Nick’s response. On some level, this could be an introductory filmmaking exercise: a whole series of extremely deliberate shots and edits designed to show this man’s feeling of inadequacy. But within the general precision of Jenkin’s style, the moment doesn’t stand out. Instead, it’s one in a long line of specific, human moments through which he builds his narrative and conjures a mood.

Such straightforwardness give Rose of Nevada a fable-like quality: There’s no narration, but we feel the deliberate rhythms of the storytelling, the telling emphasis on certain details over others. But weirdly, it also has something of the opposite effect: The film’s intimacy and Jenkin’s attention to the elements (along with his fondness for elliptical, well-timed flash frames) lends everything an otherworldly aura. Despite the time travel premise, nobody’s running around looking for a time machine to take them back, nor are they wasting much time trying to figure out how the dynamics of time travel work. The writer-director lets the unexplainable remain unexplained, because he’s interested more in our emotional response to it. We watch how people interact with these transformed versions of Nick and Liam, and we watch Nick and Liam’s own disparate responses to this new world, to the competing philosophies of life that emerge from this bewitching film. Rose of Nevada’s power lies in its peculiarities.