Name: Rose of Nevada
Director: Mark Jenkin
Genre: Science Fiction, Mystery, Drama
Released: 2026-06-19
Duration: 114 min
Cast: George MacKay, Callum Turner, Francis Magee, Edward Rowe, Rosalind Eleazar

A boat that should not exist is tied up at the quay. The Rose of Nevada went out once, three decades ago, and never came back. Now it sits in a small Cornish harbour as if it had only stepped out for the afternoon, hull intact, paint too fresh for its years. The men who crewed it the first time are dead, or have gone quiet, and nobody can say where it has been.

Two locals take the empty berths anyway, because work is work and the boat pays. Nick and Liam crew a single voyage, and the water hands them back to a village that has not finished happening — younger faces, an older quay, a debt that belonged to other men and is now somehow theirs. Mark Jenkin films the passage not as a stunt but as weather. Something arrives, lifts everything it touches, and draws back out, and the crew can only hold on while it moves through them.

George MacKay plays Nick as a man already half-erased, careful and watchful, holding himself still so the world will overlook him. Callum Turner gives Liam the opposite climate — forward motion, appetite, the need for the boat to mean a future rather than a trap. The pairing is the film’s argument before a word of plot arrives: two kinds of wanting, set against a sea that has no opinion about either. Francis Magee and Edward Rowe work the edges of the deck, and Rosalind Eleazar and Mary Woodvine hold the shore the men keep failing to return to.

Jenkin builds films the way other people develop photographs. He shoots on 16mm, processes the stock by hand, and lays in sound after the image, so the picture arrives grained and the voices sit a half-step off the lips. The effect is not nostalgia, it is pressure. Every rope, winch and diesel cough carries weight, and the grain seems to remember older sea pictures and older men. He wrote, shot and cut the film himself, sharing the story credit with Mary Woodvine, and the surface he makes is the meaning — texture doing the work that exposition usually does.

Sound is where the method turns strange. Because Jenkin records dialogue and effects separately and rebuilds the track by hand, the boat creaks slightly out of step with itself, gulls and engines pressing in from the wrong distance. The film hears the past the way memory does, a little dubbed, a little wrong, and that small wrongness is what makes the slip in time land in the body before the plot has explained anything.

Rose of Nevada completes the loose Cornish trilogy Jenkin began with Bait and continued with Enys Men, three studies of a coast where labour, landscape and memory refuse to stay in separate rooms. Here the method collapses the distance between a working boat and a haunted one. The same gear that makes the trawler real makes it uncanny, because nothing on board is allowed to feel like a special effect. The slip in time is never explained, and the refusal is the point: the film cares about what it is like to be carried somewhere you did not choose, not about the machinery that carried you.

That refusal is also the gamble. Sold to international audiences on a science-fiction and mystery hook, the film withholds the satisfactions those labels promise — there is no room full of rules, no clean reveal, no door the plot closes behind you. Viewers arriving for a puzzle may find mood where they expected mechanism, and Jenkin’s analogue manner, to a sceptic, can look like style insisting on itself. The film proves the spell is real. It does not promise the spell will hold for everyone who steps aboard.

Critics who caught it on the festival run answered to exactly that tactility. Empire called it a film you can virtually feel, and it left Venice and Toronto with the kind of notices that tend to follow a picture into its theatrical life rather than fade with the lights. The praise has been broad enough to set an expectation the film itself works hard not to flatter, which is its own quiet test of whether mood can carry a release this far from the multiplex.

The credited crew runs George MacKay and Callum Turner at the front, with Francis Magee, Edward Rowe, Rosalind Eleazar and Mary Woodvine. Jenkin directs from his own screenplay; the film runs 114 minutes and was produced by Bosena with Film4, the British Film Institute and Head Gear Films. It premiered at the Venice Film Festival and worked through Toronto, Glasgow and Dublin before reaching cinemas.

Rose of Nevada opened in British and Irish cinemas on 24 April 2026 through BFI Distribution. It reaches the United States on 19 June 2026, opening in New York through 1-2 Special ahead of a wider release. Most other territories have so far seen the film only at festivals, with no theatrical date yet confirmed.