Rust never looked as meaningful as it does in “Rose of Nevada.” Like a gallery of evocative paintings, images of this decay, impossibly crusted and rich, overwhelm the screen in the film’s opening seconds. It’s a good primer not only for a movie about an old ghost ship sailing in from the past, but for one that looks, sounds and feels like it came from a film canister once stowed away in an archive in the ’80s, only now being unearthed and dusted off.
Written and directed by Mark Jenkin, the film follows Nick (George MacKay) and Liam (Callum Turner), two hired hands off the Cornish coast who step onto the Rose of Nevada, a small languishing boat that appears out of the fog, and somehow sail back decades into the past.
But narrative is beside the point. Jenkin patiently unfurls the story and characters, and even when its sort-of sci-fi, sort-of spooky mystery becomes apparent, it serves as mere scaffolding for a dreamlike sensory experience of grief and memory. It’s best not to rely on resolution or logic, but instead to surrender to texture. From a perspective of pure atmosphere, this is arguably the most mesmerizing film of the year thus far.
Using scuzzy, tactile cinematography and creaky audio, Jenkin is interested in breaking and reconstructing familiar filmic grammar — here, a utensil simply being handed over manages to create tension just waiting to burst. That vintage quality becomes a threshold into the hypnotically mournful, wherein dreamscapes dance on the edge of nightmare, and ghost stories suddenly feel like desperate attempts to retrieve what was lost.
Rose of Nevada
Not Rated. 1 hour 54 minutes.
Rose of Nevada
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes. In theaters.
