A noteworthy and category-goosing indie film from Britain, Rose of Nevada neatly illustrates the point that the aesthetics and mechanics of the suspense/thriller genre can allow for artistic stretching and reinvention. That’s a lesson famously exercised and explored by Hitchcock, Claude Chabrol, Brian DePalma, and others, and the deftly original writer-director Mark Jenkins throws a sly, skilled creative hand into the game.
The smell of art begins at the beginning in this hypnotic saga of a haunted boat and at least one haunted man, with a patchwork of evocative close-up shots giving a sense of cryptic cropped slices of images — which could double as sensitive still photographs.
In the loosely-told narrative of the film, supernatural elements mix it up with suspense cinema turns, while being grounded by the very real and pressing realities of a rusty fishing vessel called Rose of Nevada — our protagonist, in a way — weathering stormy seas and flesh and bloody matters. It’s a visceral vessel through time, space, and altered states of reality and identity. What we do know is that the Rose went missing for 30 years and local fishermen were lost at sea: hungry new workers (George McKay, Callum Turner) set out, and the yield is fishy in more than just a seafood sense. In the story, the shock of their realizing that identity and a time-space continuum mind warp have changed their lives for the weirder gives way to resignation, and even a semblance of a happy ending.
Elastic storyline aside, the film will be remembered for its almost didactic use of close-up shots: the cinematographic tactic has some of the ascetic severity of some of Robert Bresson’s films, as with his focusing on body parts and below-the-waist shots in Lancelot du Lac. Supplanting the traditional tactic of using establishing shots to set a scene, this opening gallery of tight, static shots manages to quickly convey the humble, weathered texture of the rundown seaside town where the action will unfold period at the same time, the abundance of close-ups quickly becomes an essential visual vocabulary to the film lending it a kind of objective detachment which then adds to the fable-like quality of the film.
To be sure, this is not an entry in the British “kitchen sink” realism camp — unlesssaid sink was designed by Giorgio de Chirico.
Jenkins is that rare bird in cinema, a bona-fide auteur — and with bonus points. As he did with his attention-getting 2019 film Bait, Jenkins wrote, directed, produced, edited and scored Rose of Nevada. His score helps to aurally compliment the mysterious goings-on, with a spare and dream-like musical bed which can be gruffly ambient in nature, almost more of a sonic coating than a traditional soundtrack, as we’ve come to know them.
Needless to say, Rose of Nevada is not your typical thriller — or maybe it’s a thriller for those with a taste for slow-brew cinema and oblique approaches to storytelling. Jekins pulls us deep inside a world we never fully understand, but we can enjoy the sensory soak of it all, one close-up better time.
View trailer here. Rose of Nevada opens at the SBIFF Riviera Theatre on July 24.
