Reverse Shot A different angle on moving images—past, present, and future

Down the Hatch
By Alexander Mooney

New York Film Festival 2025:
Rose of Nevada
Dir. Mark Jenkin, U.K., no distributor

Blown-out celluloid; blooms of varicolored rust and fungi; the creak and crackle of derelict machines; spectral shimmers of forgotten history—the cinema of Mark Jenkin revels in states of decay. More than just a trendy fetish for outworn textures, the Cornish filmmaker’s longstanding commitment to analogue forms is thematically essential to his latest, Rose of Nevada, which both dramatizes and aestheticizes the insidious, nostalgic pull of bygone eras. The film’s title is first seen stenciled on the bow of a deserted fishing boat, drifting back to harbor after 30 years lost at sea. The eponymous ghost ship will soon collapse the past and present for doomed deckhands Nick (George MacKay) and Liam (Callum Turner), who emerge from this temporal twilight zone to find themselves inhabiting the lives of Luke and Alan—the crewmen that vanished from their village with the vessel in the early ’90s.

Pitched with the cryptic tone of a fireside chiller, Rose of Nevada is a delicate, fine-tuned thing. As with his 2019 debut Bait, also set in Cornwall’s working-class coastal milieu, and his 2022 folk horror film Enys Men, Jenkin shot Rose himself on a 16mm Bolex with no live sound, opting to mix, record, and compose all of the film’s aural elements in postproduction. The uncanny effects of this approach lend his tactile imagery a subtle layer of distortion, the story seemingly echoed from a distant point in time, its characters hemmed in by italicized anachronisms.

Jenkin patiently unspools the paranormalities lurking in the crevices of this village that time forgot, situating the viewer with a kitchen-sink realism that seamlessly gives way to formalist abstraction. Shivering, seasick camera movements are punctuated by hypnotic slo-mo and stasis; resounding ticks from nearby clocks are cut short mid-scene; old advertisements foretell a commercial future that never comes; and the town begins to resemble a faded postcard, a dispatch from stabler times that are better left in the past tense.

Rose of Nevada’s meticulous craft offers a bevy of immediate sensory pleasures, but it’s best displayed in the construction of the characters, and their place in a community that surrounds and eventually imprisons them. The stark difference between the village’s bustling past and unpeopled present puts the stakes of the Rose’s expedition into context for both the protagonists and a local economy dependent on the fruits of their physical labor. We first see Nick exiting a food bank, hastening home to his beloved wife and daughter. A water-logged roof leaks steadily into their kitchen, which the devoted family man tries and fails to patch himself—when he falls through the ceiling, their domestic space is punctured as a result of an immediate financial lack, forewarning the more profound familial and temporal ruptures that await upon his return from work.

Liam drifts into the desolate, destitute town from nowhere in particular. He stumbles upon the Rose’s open position and quickly heads to the local bar—monikered “the Ship”—where he tries to get a drink on credit. He meets a beautiful young woman, also rebuffed by the bartender for having run up too high a tab. Their flirtations are interrupted by the arrival of her mother, Tina (Rosalind Eleazar), widow of the long-lost Alan. As she leaves the bar, the young woman kisses Liam and places her father’s red baseball cap on his head. “Now you have to come back,” she says. Neither one is aware that Liam will soon return as the hat’s original owner. This queasy oedipal grace note, struck again when the cap is returned to her as a little girl (a moment seen through a watching surveillance camera), weaves a strain of unarticulated peril into the act of playing house.

Nick will lose a wife and daughter, while Liam will gain them. Nick rejects his change of scenery wholeheartedly, to anyone who will listen, while Liam grows into the comfy confines of domesticity. Nick looks the part of the struggling breadwinner, but Liam assumes the role of a provider with the ease and affability of an impostor. Jenkin’s attention to his characters’ footwear (an admitted sartorial fetish) is significant from moment one: Nick wears workman’s boots, Liam wears sneakers. The film’s symbolism frequently teeters on the edge of opacity, but Jenkin’s knack for staging his ideas through behavior and gesture carry the film through its wobbliest passages. In one scene, the ship’s trap door leading to the upper deck becomes a figurative threshold, deliberately crossed by a counterfeit father figure, leaving his homesick crewmate below with the heaps of gutted fish—a spatial confirmation of two men irreversibly trading places.

MacKay’s favored facial tics are well-suited to a character who wears his harried and horrified heart on his sleeve, and Turner brings a taciturn suavity to Liam that veils a deeper mystery; while the latter performance is arguably the film’s enigmatic tour-de-force, saucer-eyed Nick is our primary point of identification. That said, we’re rarely limited to his point of view—Jenkin’s camera serves as a sinister, omniscient tour guide through this maritime supernature, flitting between the shifting perspectives of the townsfolk: Tina and the Rose’s owner (Edward Roe) enlist these desperate men seemingly aware of the time-warping outcome, a historical revision that will economically benefit the floundering community; skipper Murgey (Francis Magee) tutors Nick and Liam, playing into type like someone who’s lost all sight and memory of who he is outside of his work; Luke’s parents (Nick’s neighbors in the present, played by Adrian Rawlins and Jenkin regular Mary Woodvine) struggle to understand Nick’s insistence that he isn’t their son, while past-Tina squares her suspicions that Liam isn’t the man she married with her undeniable need for somebody to lean on.

Rose of Nevada’s communal portraiture fleshes out its protagonist’s inverted parallel purgatories, lending them relational depth and situational urgency. Jenkin deftly folds his characters’ fraying psychologies into a larger view of the measures a neglected town will go to in order to preserve its place on the map; in the final stretch, Nick and Liam gradually come into focus as laborers exploited by a flailing industry, one that entices workers with the promise of community and stability only to render them interchangeable cogs milked for profit. The film’s stirring and startling final shot finds the two men in an identical pose of departure to the last known photo of their historical counterparts; as the Rose tugs them out to sea, and out of frame, the men’s faces are blank, suspended in stoic submission to their newfound positions as ghosts in the machine.