A fishing boat that vanished 30 years ago mysteriously returns to the harbor of a Cornish fishing village, launching the haunting supernatural drama ROSE OF NEVADA. George MacKay and Callum Turner star in this British tale, directed and written by BAFTA-winner Mark Jenkin. The supernatural mystery, which debuted at the Venice Film Festival and played the Toronto Film Festival last year, is the third in the auteur director’s Cornwall trilogy.
“So, it’s back” says local villager Mike (Edward Rowe) when he discovers the long-missing boat bobbing at the pier. The remark is said with mild surprise rather than the shock you might expect to greet the reappearance of a boat gone for three decades, leaving us with the feeling that the word “again” might be added.
Mike, an older man, balding, with longish blonde hair, is a former businessman who once owned this boat, the Rose of Nevada, which was lost a sea with all hands long ago. He takes its reappearance a sign, and soon after he spots it, discusses it’s return with another villager, a middle-aged woman named Tina (Rosalind Eleazar), as they stand on the pier gazing down at the old boat. These two are are among the few remaining who remember the lost boat, and their mysterious discussion focuses on that, and the prospect of sending the boat back out to sea, which requires finding a crew to do that.
Unsurprisingly, the boat is in poor shape, with broken, with faded red paint and tangled rusty cable strewn on its deck, looking like something that has been adrift in the ocean for a long time. The nearby village on the Cornwall coast also has clearly seen better days. Everything is faded and decaying, with rusting fishing equipment abandoned along streets and a village pub with a barely-readable sign and with few patrons inside. The sense is that the once-prosperous fishing village has fallen on hard times, and has been abandoned by many of its former residents.
In the run-down village, Nick (George MacKay) is a young husband and father, with a leaky roof and little money. Nick is a good person, who helps his elderly neighbors, the Richards (Adrian Rawlins and Mary Woodvine), who is kind to Mrs. Richards who is confused and still mourning her dead son. Meanwhile, a drifter named Liam (Callum Turner) arrives in the village, visits the nearly-empty local pub and chats with Tina’s daughter (Yana Penrose).
As Mike is cleaning up and restoring the boat, a grizzled man (Francis Magee) walks up and asks if he needs a skipper. There are hints that they have met before but little is clear. Later, Mike calls the man Murgey but we never hear the skipper say his name. Shortly after, the drifter Liam (Callum Turner) joins the skipper aboard as crew. Mike and Tina worry about completing the crew, which cannot leave with a short-handed, but then Nick turns up, and signs on to take the last spot on the crew, hoping to earn enough to fix his roof.
When leaving home, Nick told his wife he’ll only be gone three days, but as he heads to the boat, he is stopped by his neighbor, confused old Mrs. Richards, who seems to mistake him for her dead son and tells him she will see him soon, leaving Nick with an uneasy feeling.
There are other strange, foreboding signs but with the crew complete, the fishing boat prepares to depart. On board, more strange signs appear, like a message carved into the woodwork and a faded red cap off the old boat, but the crew ignore them and set to work fishing.
After three days of hard work fishing, the boat returns to the village, where the crew are shocked to hear they have been gone three years, not three days. Things look different in the little fishing village, better in fact. Signs are freshly painted, streets are clean and there is an air of prosperity. The crumbling pub is now bright and filled with people and life. When the young family man, headed for home, is pulled into the pub, he encounters people he knows, including his old neighbors, who, oddly, look much younger now. In the pub, Nick discovers the boat has returned to the time when it first left, traveling back in time thirty years. Even more unsettling, now everyone greets him and his crew mate Liam by the names of that original crew.
This strange time-traveling puzzle confounds and shocks both Liam and Nick, but MacKay’s Nick is particularly disturbed. Liam is surprised to be greeted at the dock by a younger version of the middle-aged Tina, now younger and with her little daughter in tow, who treats him as if they have a relationship, Nick is dismayed to find himself mistaken for the lost son of his old neighbors, now younger, and with no sign of his own little family. Horrified, Nick struggles to figure out how to understand, and correct, this weird situation, and focuses on returning to sea as a way to get back to the present.
Despite the foreshadowing, the time-travel comes as an unsettling twist, in part because everything appears so grounded in the real aboard the boat at sea. The story is a mystery with a ghostly, supernatural aspect but it is also about profoundly human things, about loss and grief, second chances, personal sacrifice and community, with what is owed to that community. Tragedy and heartbreak vie with a sense of hope and restoration in this thought-provoking supernatural drama.
Director Mark Jenkin does a masterful job building eerie tension and a sense of ghostly mystery right from the start. From the beginning, we sense that something supernatural, even ghostly, is afoot, although details about what that is come out slowly.
Jenkin is greatly aided by a strong cast, led by George MacKay, who gives a superb performance as Nick, the young family man who only wanted to earn some quick money but now finds himself in an intractable dilemma. The film touches on complex emotions, of loss and grief, of fear and frustration, many of which play out marvelously on MacKay’s expressive face.
The themes of loss and grief extend to other characters, but other feelings emerge for the other people in this supernatural tale, of hope and second chances. While MacKay’s Nick is desperate to return to the present and his family, the drifter Liam, played by Callum Turner, finds a chance for a new beginning in this new world and time. For Tina and the Richards, and the village as a whole, the mysterious changes bring a restoration of hope.
ROSE OF NEVADA is full of atmospheric unease and knotty choices but also is filled with visual beauty, with striking, artfully-composed images that a visual grace that is sometimes gasp-inducing. Jenkin shot the film on 16mm with a handheld camera which gives the film a distinctive, painterly look in many shots, but also suggests archival footage in other shots, with camera flare, scratches and other filmic effects. The skillful photography captures the wild beauty of the sea, the stately stone walls and gentle decay of old fisherman’s tools. Jenkin also shot the film without sound, adding sound and dialog later in post-production, with seamless effect.
MacKay’s character is rattled when he is mistaken for his neighbors’ lost son and tries desperately to find a way to reach out to his own family. As Nick works to unravel the mystery, a sense of horror grows about the true nature of what is taking place. He is thrown into emotional turmoil as he peels back layers of this complexity. Meanwhile, Turner’s once-homeless fellow crew member seems invigorated to find a second chance at life, embraced by a younger version of the woman who planned the trip, and her now-small daughter, as the man who went to sea thirty years earlier.
The ending of this British supernatural mystery is both disturbing and open-ended, and happens without explaining everything or tying things up neatly. It is the kind of ending more common in British films than American ones, and may leave some American audiences uncomfortable.
ROSE OF NEVADA opens Friday, Aug. 7, at the Hi Pointe Cinema and other select theaters.
RATING: 3 out of 4 stars
