ROSE OF NEVADA - The Popcorn Junkies Movie Review (Spoilers)

Añadido: 2026-05-09

[00:00:10]Hello popcorn junkies and welcome to this review of Rose of Nevada. Ah I really really really have been looking forward to seeing this film. This is the third film by Cornish director Mark Jenin. Uh anyone who knows our channel, our other output, you'll know how much we are uh devotees of Cornwall, the Cornish landscape, the Cornish heritage, Cornish myth, Cornish nature, uh the art, the creativity, the light, the essence. We we love everything Cornish.

[00:00:41]And if only it wasn't such an obvious act of I hate to say it, but gentrification for people from London to want to move to Cornwall. genuinely feel in a previous life um I feel a kind of kinship with Cornish fisherman. I really do. When I'm in St. Ives, when I'm in Mausel, Penzance, Mulan, I just feel a tug and ease, a natural hankering for the rugged, dangerous, risky, frightening landscape and uh sea that is Cornwall. I love the place. It's beautiful. Um and as I say, this is the third film by Mark Jenin. Now, tragically, I haven't yet seen his second film. His second film was Enis Men. Um, and I believe this is the third in a trilogy of his Cornish films, his Cornish trilogy. His first film, Bait, was an incredibly um well, I mean, he may argue as a director, it's not experimental, but it in terms of modern film making, Bait was shot on a I think a windup bolex uh 16 mil camera. uh much of the sound, much of the audio was recorded post in post and then synced up with the action. So it had a sort of ghostly echo and sort of resonance to it. Um I think I said at the time when I reviewed Bait, uh it felt more like an archaeological relic or something that you would discover a little bit like a Celtic cross sort of covered in moss and lichen uh in the middle of a field somewhere near Nuland or something like that. Well, this film is kind of uh not too dissimilar in so far as it feels like it has an organic element to it. He films on film, he edits on film. Um he scratches on film. He he you can you see and feel the organic nature of the celluloid in every single frame of certainly bait and I would assume men.

[00:02:30]Uh but in this this this is a sort of hyper hyper saturated almost super eight quality to this film and he indulges in some of the similar kind of sound recording post-production sound of post syncing uh or syncing up uh sound that was recorded in post after recording and then laid underneath the characters talking. This is a ghostly film. This is a an unsettling film. It's a timetraveling film and it's a kind of nightmarish nightmarish ghost story film. It's it's a ghost ship film.

[00:03:03]I loved every conceivable second of this film. I loved its disorientation. I I loved the I loved the the extent to which it felt unhurried. I loved the way in which it it estued and didn't care for conventional narrative uh tropes like character arcs or characterization.

[00:03:21]I loved its sense of place. I mean, things started well for me when you hear the sound of seagulls. You hear the sea air. And we start with a number of extraordinarily close-up, incredibly textural shots of like uh doors and um and rope and uh wood and slate and the bits the debris, the detritus uh the stuff of living by the coast where there is a really kind of battered rusty sense of uh mortality to everything.

[00:03:56]Everything is in the process of being made elemental. I mean, anything that's constructed in a coastal setting in Cornwall uh once privy to the kind of the brutality of wind and sea and salt and air uh is mutable and it starts to change and it starts to change color and it changes shape and and things go rotten and things go off and and the reason I'm going on off on one like this is the film starts with a series of kind of static shots almost like abstract almost abstract paintings, abstract photographs and I would argue that this film and this filmmaker Mark Jenkins sits firmly within a wellestablished tradition of Cornish art, artistry and artists. Yes, he's a filmmaker, but you know, we've had the likes, I mean, I think Rothkco painted down there, Hepworth, Peter Lion. There's a huge long history, Alfred Wallace, of of of of artists. It's an artist's community in St. Ives and and this film really feels like an extension of that, albeit within the realm of cellular. So, you know, we if there's anyone in the cast that one would recognize, it's George Mai. We have a sense a guy just stumbling walking through his fishing village. It could be Nuki, could be Mousel. Um, he stumbles across a boat.

[00:05:11]He a boat that has that went missing 20 30 years ago. It's called the Rose of Nevada. The boat uh he kind of he's perplexed by this. The the two guys who were on the boat went missing some, you know, years ago. And then we have these two sort of earnest new fishermen or young fishermen uh who decide to make use of the boat with a skipper and they head out to sea. And this really I mean there were moments in this film where really this is about these two young guys played by George Mai and Callum Turner, Nick and Liam. They become the new kind of uh you know fisherman. Uh they have a skipper who's quintessential skipperess you know with his kind of Cornish jumper on and his beard and he rolls cigarettes and all the rest of it.

[00:05:55]And yet you've got this real sense of a sort of lost lifestyle happening in in in the in the port town in the in the harbor town. You've got life is quite quiet. It's quite boring. It's quite dull. There's not an awful lot on offer for these young guys to do. They don't have a coin. They don't have any coins to rub together to even buy a drink to flirt with the local, you know, one of the local women. Um, you know, uh, George Mai is within a family, lives in a home where there's a hole in the extension to the roof and it's dripping.

[00:06:25]I mean, the s, you know, something that's so brilliant about Mark Jenin as a filmmaker is the sense of elements, the elemental. You watch this film, I mean, you know, like in a film like June, you feel like you come out of the cinema with sand in your teeth. With this film, I felt damp. I felt wet. I felt like I had a leak somewhere. I felt like I was in galosshes. I felt like I was sort of like I had a really heavy dank jumper on. Um the sense of the element, the sense of the sea is is phenomenal. It sort of soaks into the houses. I mean, we get some pretty obvious kind of signs, sort of portentous signs where we have this sort of old witch-like woman who is like the elder of the family and she's sort of is she blind? Can she see him? She's sort of looking sort of mental and crazy and and she's got long sort of silvery hair, very McBthy and witchy and and she can see the future. She there's a reference to the fact that she's lost her son. We see a photograph on the mantelpiece in in this uh sort of fisherman's cottage of a a boat with these other two guys on it. And there were moments in this actually. This is a kind there are so many sort of other filmic parallels within this film. the photograph of the original old lost Rose of Nevada crew, if you like, who we begin to discover are going to be replaced by George Mckai and Callum Turner, the young guys in this. It very much reminded me there was a similar thing going on here almost to, you know, in The Shining when Jack Nicholson comes in and they're looking at the photos of the the hotel in the old days and then he starts to see himself in the photos, the historic photos of this this place. But he couldn't be in the photos. How could that work? Well, they head out to sea.

[00:08:03]It's tough. They're struggling. We see a lot of process. We get a lot of wind. We get a lot of fish. They're catching fish. It's brutal. It's harsh. It's tough. George Mai notices sort of carved into uh his bed head if you like on his bed in the in the boat. Uh abandon this ship. Get off the ship or do not sail on this ship. Basically, a warning sort of carved into the wood. Um and and that sort of it tells you it sort of indicates that this is this is really it's not it's not a horror but it is quite unsettling and scary. He's you know these guys are essentially heading off in a boat and there's no obvious or logical explanation as to what has happened. And this is what I like about the film. It doesn't seek to make sense of everything. It just leans into the disorientation of them heading out and then when they arrive back in port or harbor says Mausel the village the fishing village has got a vibe to it.

[00:08:58]It's busier. There's and and I know Mark Jenin the filmmaker is very a very keen kind of uh activist almost for the you know the industry and e economics of Cornwall. It's an incredibly poor uh county. It's a county that's exploited by second home owners from, you know, places like London. People travel in there. Unfortunately, people like us who travel there like to go there, but we haven't gone that extra yard because, you know, the locals get priced out of their homes, priced out of the fishing villages. You know, there's a lost lifestyle. And his first film, Bait, very much uh references that this idea of an incoming or sort of an invasion, if you like, of the cities. Well, this film kind of deals with that too in so far as when they decide when George Mai and Callum Turner decide to board the ship and head out because the fishing village is depending on them and this boat's turned up that disappeared all those years ago. When they head out, the fishing village is in dire straits and there isn't much going on there.

[00:09:51]Everyone's bored, listless. There's a sort of emptiness. There's a lack of life. Everything's dead. But when they arrive back, they've essentially traveled back in time. They've traveled back in time to the time of, I presume, the original two who were on the boat who headed off out to sea and never returned. But now they've returned, but they've returned back in time 3 years prior to when George Mai, Nick, the character Nick, was supposed to be born. But life is much more viby. The pubs are busy. Uh there's beer, there's there's people, there's people chatting, there's people singing, there's a there's life. There's life in the village. And these two guys are now instrumental and critical to bringing fish to feed the denisens. I love that word denisens of the fishing village. Um and yeah, and and what's lovely about this film is it just leaves us with that. You're sort of thinking George Mai is the character who who who notic Well, they both do. I mean, um Liam, the two characters Nick and Liam, they both notice that whoa, this is a bit weird.

[00:10:49]Life's changed. We've gone back or we've gone forward. We've gone back. But anyway, something weird has happened.

[00:10:54]And the weird thing is is George Mai's character Nick struggles with this. He wants to return back to the life that he had at the beginning of the film before they set off on the boat. But Liam, played by Callum Turner, he's he doesn't mind. He's now, albeit that he's traveled back in time and he's now flirting with essentially the woman who' be the mum of the woman he was flirting at the beginning of the film. He doesn't mind this. And I thought this was an interesting parallel between the two characters, there are people, aren't there, in life who don't really mind what the explanation is for things. And I'm wondering whether this is something that we all kind of have gone through in recent years or with the, you know, awful politics of of the world and COVID and what have you. You know, there was a time when I look back when as humans, we just we didn't ask as many questions as we do now. We would settle for whatever came our way and go, "Okay, well, this is odd, but let's go with it. It's I just want to be comfortable. I want to just enjoy my life, live my life." Well, the character of Liam in this uh settles into this deeply contradictory, deeply unsettling and strange and beusing setup, whereas George Mai really struggles with it. But what I like about this film is it's an incredibly innovative and original uh meditation if you like on the in inverted commas gains, progresses and losses of time uh for Cornwall as a as a a place to live and as a place to work. The vast majority of people in this country and from other parts of the world only view Cornwall as a tourist destination. And you know, in the opening sequences where George Mai is heading into food banks and things like that, the the poverty aspect of Cornwall uh and the Cornish way of life is really reolent and and in your face right at the beginning. I thought I I thought his choice in the casting was great, too. The the diversity in the cast. I I think many people who kind of go and visit Cornwall don't necessarily think of even people of color living in Cornwall. So I thought that was a really strident way of just kind of reminding everyone that Cornwall is itself a melting pot of modern cultures, modern diversity with all of the pressures and alienations that come with that. Um, you know, so you've got food banks, you've got this povertystricken nowness at the beginning of this film, and then when he heads back to the '9s, uh, when they come back to the '9s, and, you know, Liam is is is more comfortable with this, uh, with this kind of strange time travel than than Nick is, George Mai, you sort of think, well, there was a lot more to like back then. It was weird because almost the very act of going back for me, the fact that we go back to 1993 and Mark Jenin does a really good job of kind of re reimagining uh Cornwall or this fishing village in 93 that 93 9293 was around the first time I started traveling to Cornwall. I've filmed there. I've worked there before, but it was the first I think the very first time I ever traveled there uh for leisure might have been when I was 23 and that would have been 1993. And so I had a real sense of what Cornwall was like back then. The other part of all of this is that this as an art form Mark Jenin must be and probably is uh one of our leading proponents of the organic nature of film. You realize watching this film that that celluloid the act of light hitting film the you know the use of composition everything becomes eminently photographic. Uh there were moments in this which felt like we were watching the the artistry of a stills photographer and an abstract painter and a sculpture. Every shot, even if it was like a cup that they're drinking from on the boat with a sort of really dated 1990s yellow flower on it to a mirror in a in a really suburban lounge or a really otherwise non, you know, the the head of a doll or things like that.

[00:14:36]Everything about this film felt so familiar, felt so nostalgic and whilst unsettling. It wasn't exactly scary. And yet, there were moments in this. There's some great dream sequences where again, the dreaminess, if you like, of the now, the reality that we're meant to be going through is so offbeat and strange. And you've got this curious kind of tugof-war with the the way in which the soundtracks being recorded and their voices have been recorded. There's a sense of ghostliness. There's a sense of echoes of the past. There's a sense of people almost walking within their own footsteps again and again. and you have this idea of shadows and and and memories and and loss and and nostalgia and nostalgic things. Um, and George Mai is absolutely I mean they're both great counter and George Mai, but George Mai is the the main character who's deeply disturbed by everything where he's disturbed by the hole which is leaking in the extension to their their cottage and then he goes up onto the top and he tries to fix it with tarpool in and then he falls through the roof. all of that and then you have a moment of one of the moments later in the film where the skipper the sort of captain bird's eye skipper tips into tips into the sea at one point and they have to rescue him and pull him back in. This is ghostly.

[00:15:49]This is ghostboaty stuff. And the idea there's even a moment earlier in the film where the guy I I always forget that you know you have a skipper and you have the guys who do the fishing and pull the rope pull the nets in and all the rest of it. But you've got someone who owns the boat and he's kind of recruited if you like the skipper and the boys to go on the boat and fish.

[00:16:06]boat. There's the owner of the boat.

[00:16:08]Well, the owner of the boat is the guy at the beginning of the film who discovers this boat has come back after 30 years. Um, he kicks the kind of metal kind of boiler plate, if you like, of the name of the boat into the sea, almost like to sort of deny it its past, but it's a relic. Where did it go? Why is it back? You don't end up asking any literal questions. You just accept that this troller boat, this fisherman's boat has traveled in time.

[00:16:33]It's gone out. It's gone into a sort of strange Bermuda triangle and it's come back and it's entered a different era of Cornish life. It makes you think on it makes you think about the nature of Cornwall. It makes you think about the nature of of fishing. It makes you think about the nature of time and relationships and and it's kind of waiting for Godoesque as well. It's sort of like there's an eternal constant sort of sailing out bringing back the fish.

[00:16:58]You might not get the fish. You might die. You might not die. And yet you've got this ghostly thing which really stuck with me all the way through this.

[00:17:04]Just like with The Shining, you I keep returning back to the photograph that's in a just a very nondescript frame on a side piece of the original two guys with their huge boxes of fish on their their recent troll of fish. They're the ones who went missing at the beginning of the film. And now we have these two who are going out repeatedly. And one presumes that eventually their fate, Liam and Nick's fate, even though they've traveled back in time and have now become the ones who've gone from the photo, they too, no doubt, will probably not come back one day. Incredibly moving, incredibly beautiful, fabulously made, an absolute topdraw piece of indie, thoughtful, instinctual, elemental film making. Beautiful. And I would give this 100 out of 100.