Rose of Nevada – Glasgow Film Festival 2026 Review

It’s hard to know how to write about Rose of Nevada, written and directed by iconoclastic Cornish filmmaker Mark Jenkin. It’s a story that juggles timelines and shifts identities, and holds the viewer in a state of confusion for pretty much all of its nearly two-hour runtime. In many, if not most cases, it would be annoying to be confused for such a duration. Not so here.

The bare bones of the plot are these, and even they are up for contention. As with Jenkin’s breakout 2019 movie Bait, our setting is a Cornish fishing village. Novice fishermen Nick (George MacKay) and Liam (Callum Turner) join the crew of a mysterious vessel that had been missing for thirty years, under the tutelage of salty sea dog Murgey (Francis Magee). Although it’s tough work, the men get along fine at sea. It’s when they come back that things are… different.

Throughout the film, there are frequent ‘clues’ as to what’s going on; actors appear clearly wearing old age make up, and then with their own faces; a red baseball cap changes owners and timelines; a hole in the roof of George’s house portends something; someone has scratched, ‘GET OF THE BOAT NOW’ onto his bunk on the boat. Sometimes, it seems as if this is a puzzle box with an answer to the central mystery, there waiting for those who are paying close enough attention, and are willing to think laterally.

The more the movie progresses though, the more the idea of there being some kind of neat answer to be unearthed here starts to seem unlikely. You might imagine that making Rose of Nevada a frustrating watch, but you’d be mistaken. In the hands of Mark Jenkin, confusion is a delightful state, and to wish for answers is to miss the forest for the trees.

Few directors today are making films both as strange and as thickly atmospheric. As is his favoured method, Jenkin shot his latest on a 16mm camera; the first time we see George MacKay, it’s actually a little jarring because Rose of Nevadalooks so very much like a film from the eighties or nighties that has been extricated from an old VHS. This makes the movie feel gorgeously textured and tangible, an effect aided by the sporadic flares across the screen that recall warped polaroid photography. That the dialogue is added in post-production adds further to this feeling of off-kilter filmic physicality.

Despite in many ways seeming like an artifact from the past, the colours are almost outrageously vivid; the red of that all-important cap, the yellow of the waders and the blue of the sea and the sky so vibrant that they could pierce a hole through any space-time continuum. The editing is mesmerisingly rhythmic, marching us on to a destination unknown, frightening and intoxicating in equal measure.