Critic Reviews

Seen from the vantage point of our hyper-digital 2020s, Jenkin isn’t just a stark outlier from the current media regime. He’s also among the very few working directors whose cinema feels both familiar and viscerally new.

It is an experience as moving as it is unnerving, and as the piercing screeching of iron rods announces the Rose of Nevada is to leave port once more, it is we the audience there to wave a pained goodbye, quietly stunned by the ethereal aura of Jenkin’s striking creation.

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.

If the idea of an art-house time travel movie tickles your fancy, then hop aboard the Rose of Nevada, though with that caveat that it is closer to La Jetée than to Donnie Darko.

The richest, most enduring pleasures here are formal ones, beginning with the exacting still-life compositions and oily, vehement primary hues of Jenkins’ 16mm lensing, which can make a painterly subject of a maritime squall or a mustard-yellow wading boot.

From a perspective of pure atmosphere, this is arguably the most mesmerizing film of the year thus far.

This story of two strangers who take a job on a fishing boat — their lives are irrevocably altered once they return to shore — slowly pulls you inside its disquieting design. By the time you get your bearings, you’re ensnared in its net.

The result is a film that is haunting and singular – a furnace-blast of the past reshaped and refashioned for our modern times.

As a story of time and tide waiting for no man, “Rose of Nevada” is haunting, bittersweet, and a little scary. As a filmed object, it’s even more fascinating: a movie that, through the sheer idiosyncrasy of its construction and the implausibility of its existence, seems to both mourn and defy the medium’s decline. If cinema is a sinking vessel, as so many are eager to suggest, its rusty hull may yet contain treasures worth scraping off and scrutinizing anew.

A dreamy tale of loss and grief, death and resurrection, as well as a supernatural reverie about the mysterious relationship between the present and past—one in which the living are reborn as ghosts.