One dark jewel — pardon, rose — of the 2025 fall festival circuit was a new film from Cornish director Mark Jenkin starring two of the hottest British actors working right now. And it’s a movie IndieWire likened to a “haunting aesthetic nirvana.”
George MacKay and Callum Turner play fishermen caught in a time warp at sea and ashore in “Rose of Nevada,” which premiered in the Orizzonti section at Venice before wending its way to TIFF, the New York Film Festival, BFI London, and beyond. Here, the “Enys Men” director turns small towns and their denizens along the coast of Cornwall into sights of the science-fiction uncanny. Watch the film’s trailer below.
The titular Rose here is a ship that’s returned to a Cornish village 30 years after disappearing previously. Now back in the harbor, the ship arrives as if from the past without its long-missing deckhands, who may have thrown themselves overboard. That’s when two unskilled fishermen, desperate for money to feed their families, take a job on said ship without knowledge of its past — and then things get really weird, as timelines shift, and people and their personalities seem to swap. For one, Nick (MacKay) and Liam (Turner) come home to very different family scenarios than before, ones where their loved ones might not even remember them.
Jenkin constructed all the film’s sound design during post-production, writing, editing, and directing the film with a 16mm Bolex camera. More from IndieWire’s review: “Moreso than in previous work, [Jenkin] highlights the dissonance between his subject matter and his form. This is a film shot with nearly century-old methods, featuring contemporary pop songs and iPhones. When we see the town for the second time, the camera latches onto foregone technologies, jukeboxes and old-school CCTVs and stick-shift trucks. It’d be disingenuous to say this movie is not enamored with its own schtick, but it is far and away his least indulgent. Jenkins calls into question our relationship to objects of nostalgia and how we rememorize the textures of history across our lives.”
“Rose of Nevada” opens in theaters from 1-2 Special on Friday, June 19. Watch the trailer below.
