Sci-fi strangeness meets working-class struggle in Cornish director Mark Jenkin’s haunting vision, meticulously crafted with analogue methods, of a fishing boat lost decades ago that claims a new crew from the present.
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In the hands of a conventional filmmaker, this would be a conventional scary movie. Jenkin makes of it something more elusive and complex.
Rose of Nevada 2025
Atmospheric dread and aspects of folk horror drench the mysterious worlds of Mark Jenkin, who has established himself as one of the most distinctive voices in current British cinema through “new kitchen sink” films that reflect his passion for DIY experimentation.
Lately, he’s turned his interest in the timeless textures of a 16mm Bolex camera towards depicting the hands-on labour of fishermen in an era of precarity in his native Cornwall. Two cash-strapped men sign on for a stint on a fishing vessel that was lost at sea thirty years ago and has reappeared without its crew. The workers find themselves back on the initial voyage, and when they redock, it’s the 1990s — a chilling and queasy slippage in time and identity that is compounded by locals mistaking them for the dead sailors.
The only thing worse than being at sea is not being at sea, as these fishermen are inclined to say. Jenkins built all the sound post-production with an ear for the poetry of place and for the enigmatic ability of nature’s elements to seduce and terrify in equal measure.
- Carmen Gray