{Movie Review} Rose of Nevada (2026): Mark Jenkin’s Ghost Ship Sails Into the Past

Rose of Nevada is the third feature from Cornish filmmaker Mark Jenkin, and if Bait introduced the world to his singular approach and Enys Men doubled down on it, Rose of Nevada feels like the fullest expression of what he’s been building toward. Shot on 16mm Bolex and distributed by 1-2 Special, the film stars BAFTA nominees George MacKay (1917) and Callum Turner (Masters of the Air) as two men who crew a mysterious ghost ship back into service, only to return to a world that no longer quite matches the one they left. It’s haunting, deliberately paced, and stubbornly confident in its vision of storytelling.

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Jenkin, who writes, directs, edits, and scores his own films, has constructed something that feels less like a movie made in the present and more like one unearthed from your granddads basement. Shooting again on 16mm, the film carries that same worn, almost tactile quality that made Enys Men feel like folk horror. The aspect ratio is strange, the image purposefully degraded, and the whole film radiates an aesthetic that plants it firmly in the 1970s regardless of when the story is actually supposed to take place. That’s not an accident. It’s the point.

The fishing village at the heart of Rose of Nevada is a place without a future. The boats are old. The buildings are old. The people, young and old alike, carry themselves with an end-of-use exhaustion, a kind of communal resignation that the good days are not coming back. When the titular ship reappears after vanishing thirty years prior, the locals embrace it not out of logic but out of desperation and curiosness. Its something different to tslk about. Jenkin’s world-building here is tremendous. The aesthetic isn’t just a stylistic choice, it’s a thematic statement. Everything is weathered because everything is grieving something.

The film’s sound design is where things get genuinely weird, and genuinely brilliant. Virtually all the music in Rose of Nevada is diegetic, meaning it comes directly from a source you can see on screen, a speaker crackling in a corner, a radio on a shelf. There is almost no traditional score for the bulk of the film, and the effect is a profound isolation. Without the emotional scaffolding a conventional soundtrack provides, the audience is left adrift in the same existential haze as the characters. Some score does creep in by the final act, but Jenkin deploys it less to comfort than to disorient, a seeping, barely-there presence that signals something has shifted without telling you what.

MacKay plays Nick, a man desperate to provide for his young family who signs on with the Rose of Nevada out of necessity. Turner is Liam, 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, and that’s a harder task than it sounds. The movie earns a terrific Dead Zone reference along the way, that gestures toward the film’s central preoccupation: whats worse knowing the future, or being trapped in the past.

The time-loop quality of the narrative puts Rose of Nevada in loose conversation with low-fi puzzle films like Aronofsky’s Pi or the delightful Japanese oddity Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, though Jenkin’s register is considerably more gloomy than the latter. This isn’t a film interested in giving you the satisfaction of solving it. 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 entirely intentional.

What you will leave with is the memory of some genuinely arresting editing in the back half of the film, sequences where Jenkin’s control of the cut becomes the main event, warping time and perception in ways that feel earned by the 90-plus minutes that precede them. It’s the kind of filmmaking that reminds you the edit is its own language.

Rose of Nevada is not going to be for everyone, and Jenkin isn’t trying to make it so. It’s a cinematic séance conducted by someone who clearly understands both what he’s summoning and why. Nobody else is doing exactly this. That is reason enough to check it out.