Mysterious boat returns to a village 30 years after vanishing. Two men join its crew hoping for better fortune. After one voyage, they find themselves transported back in time, mistaken for the original crew.

Mark Jenkin’s third feature, ‘Rose of Nevada’, is his latest film focused on his home county of Cornwall and if you’ve seen his previous two films (‘Bait’, ‘Enys Men’), there is a familiarity in style and themes that you will recognise. ‘Rose of Nevada’ is the name of an old fishing boat that mysteriously appears back in the harbour of a small Cornwall fishing village, having been missing for 30 years. A crew is assembled to take the boat back out to sea, leading to strange circumstances when the men aboard find themselves transported 30 years back in time after one journey, with the villagers mistaking them for the men that went missing on the boat many years earlier.

The film stars George Mackay (Nick) and Callum Turner (Liam) as the two young men recruited in the present, with Nick leaving behind his wife and young child, and Liam his girlfriend. After a successful fishing trip, they return home to the past, in a time where the village is in a happier place (symbolised by the contrasts between the local pub in the past and the present, and the post office in the past being a food bank in the present), yet their lives in the present don’t exist yet. Liam adjusts to that more easily than Nick, and begins a relationship with a woman (Rosalind Eleazor), while Nick meanders about frustrated at his separation from his family.

This being Mark Jenkin, it’s not a typical time travel or ‘stuck in time’ drama, and it’s more about the themes and subtleties that linger in the subtext. It is about the differences between the past and the present and how traumas can linger through generations, and he uses the supernatural basis of the premise pretty well (certainly better than in ‘Enys Men’, which I disliked). No time for nostalgia or sentimentality here. Like his previous films, the sound is added in post-production and that makes the film feel like something discovered from the past and it is particularly effective in the fishing scenes as the clanks and clinks of the machinery blends in with the water.

I will say that this is not an easy film to follow, though it does direct you clearly to ‘clues’ as it were, and I did come away from it not full understanding what had gone in, though as a fan of David Lynch, that isn’t something that always bothers me. ‘Rose of Nevada’ is an atmospheric drama from Mark Jenkin that retains his specific focus on the Cornwall that he grew up in, with all its peculiarities and folklore. I expect this will have some very big fans.

Rating: 4/5

Directed By: Mark Jenkin

Starring: George MacKay, Callum Turner, Rosalind Eleazar, Francis Magee, Mary Woodvine and Edward Rowe

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt35674521/