In Mark Jenkin’s third feature, “Rose of Nevada,” a mysterious ghost ship returns to a fishing village that feels already finished. Shot on 16mm Bolex and powered by diegetic sound design, the film turns absence into atmosphere—then leaves the audience there,
The ghost ship doesn’t arrive with fanfare. It vanishes, returns thirty years later, and when it does, the fishing village embraces it the way people grab at breath—less from logic than from desperation and curiosity.
“Rose of Nevada” is Mark Jenkin’s third feature. and it feels like the fullest expression of the Cornish filmmaker’s singular craft. If “Bait” introduced his approach and “Enys Men” doubled down on it. this one sails deeper into what he’s been building toward: a story that feels unearthed. not released. The film is shot on 16mm Bolex and distributed by 1-2 Special, and its textures aren’t decoration. They’re the language of time.
Jenkin writes, directs, edits, and scores his own films, and “Rose of Nevada” carries that same insistence on control. Shooting again on 16mm. the movie leans into an aesthetic that is deliberately worn—an image that looks purposefully degraded. an aspect ratio that feels slightly off-balance. and a visual identity that firmly plants the film in the 1970s regardless of when the story is supposed to be taking place. That choice doesn’t try to hide itself. It announces itself.
At the heart of the story is a place without a future. The boats are old. The buildings are old. People—young and old alike—move with an end-of-use exhaustion, a communal resignation that good days aren’t coming back. When the titular ship reappears after disappearing thirty years earlier. the locals don’t treat it like a miracle to analyze. They treat it like something to hold onto.
Diegetic sound design is where the film tilts from haunting into something sharper and stranger. Virtually all the music in “Rose of Nevada” is diegetic—music that comes from sources you can see on screen: a speaker crackling in a corner. a radio on a shelf. There is almost no traditional score for much of the bulk of the film, and the effect is profound isolation. Without a conventional soundtrack to cue emotion, the audience drifts in the same existential haze as the characters.
Some score does creep in by the final act, but Jenkin uses it less to comfort than to disorient. It seeps in like a change in pressure you can’t quite name, signaling that something has shifted without explaining what.
That mood carries directly into the performances. BAFTA nominees George MacKay (“1917”) and Callum Turner (“Masters of the Air”) play Nick and Liam. MacKay’s Nick signs on with the Rose of Nevada out of necessity, desperate to provide for his young family. Turner’s Liam is a drifter with a past he’s clearly trying to outrun. Both actors do compelling work in a film that doesn’t ask them to emote so much as exist within it—harder than it sounds when the world around you is deliberately off-kilter.
The movie also earns a terrific Dead Zone reference along the way, pointing toward the film’s central preoccupation: what’s worse—knowing the future, or being trapped in the past.
The story’s time-loop quality puts “Rose of Nevada” in loose conversation with low-fi puzzle films like “Pi” and the Japanese oddity “Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes.” But Jenkin’s register is more gloomy than that bright. playful strangeness. This isn’t a film built for the satisfaction of solving. Like “Enys Men” before it. the final act leans deliberately into ambiguity. collapsing the line between what is real and what is remembered. what is present and what is haunting the present.
You won’t leave with answers. That’s not a shortcoming; it’s the point. What lingers instead is the craft—especially in the back half, where the editing becomes its own event. Jenkin’s control of the cut warps time and perception in sequences that feel earned by the 90-plus minutes that precede them. It’s the kind of filmmaking that makes you remember the edit isn’t just a tool; it’s a language.
“Rose of Nevada” won’t be for everyone, and Jenkin doesn’t appear interested in making it so. It’s a cinematic séance conducted by someone who seems to understand both what he’s summoning and why. In a crowded market of films that want to explain themselves. this one chooses to disappear into the past—then leaves you staring at the emptiness it leaves behind.
Tyler. editor in chief of Signal Horizon since its conception. is also the Director of Monsters 101 at Truman State University. a class pairing horror movie criticism with survival skills for middle and high school students to learn critical thinking. When he is not watching. teaching. or thinking about horror. he is the Director of Debate and Forensics at a high school in Kansas City. Missouri.
Rose of Nevada Mark Jenkin Cornish filmmaker 16mm Bolex ghost ship folk horror Enys Men Bait diegetic music George MacKay Callum Turner