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Rose of Nevada review – uncanny ghost ship story from one-of-a-kind Cornish auteur

Rose of Nevada review – uncanny ghost ship story from one-of-a-kind Cornish auteur

Venice film festival A vanished trawler returns in Mark Jenkin’s time-slipping film, an enigmatic drama steeped in loss, memory and the unsettling rhythms of coastal life Those in peril at sea are the subject of this arresting ghost story from Cornish film-maker Mark Jenkin. Set in a fishing village, it explores the intimate presence of death and the disquieting claustrophobia of family and community – qualities often assumed to be eternal virtues. Maybe a film of just this kind was always what Jenkin’s distinct film language was waiting for. His technique and his quasi-primitivist aesthetic favour the eerie and the uncanny; his films have the texture of early cinema updated to the present day, shot on 16mm, developed by hand in such a way as to create scratches on the print, with dialogue and ambient sound overdubbed. It all creates a drama that feels like a remembered dream, and when there are actual dream sequences the gap between the illusion and reality is very slight. The movie itself feels to me like a kind of found object, and in this digital age it is vanishingly rare to encounter something that makes you think of the lost physical reality of celluloid whirring through a projector’s old-fashioned metal sprockets. Continue reading...