Movie · 2026 · Science Fiction, Mystery, Drama · 1h 54m · English
Curator score: 6.1/10 (15.8K ratings)
Overview
A mysterious boat returns to a village 30 years after vanishing. Two men join its crew hoping for better fortune. After one voyage, they find themselves transported back in time, mistaken for the original crew.
George MacKay, Callum Turner, Francis Magee, Edward Rowe, Rosalind Eleazar, Mary Woodvine, Adrian Rawlins, Yana Penrose, Mae Voogd
Curator Review
Verdict
A moody, tactile time-slip mystery that uses its premise to explore labor, memory, and a community stranded between past and present. It’s more about atmosphere and idea than plot mechanics, but the visual and sonic texture gives it real pull.
Best for
Viewers who like eerie coastal folklore and maritime settings
Fans of art-house sci-fi that leans poetic over explanatory
People drawn to analog filmmaking and strong visual design
Audiences interested in working-class decline and nostalgia
Skip if
You want a tightly plotted, high-concept time-travel thriller
You prefer conventional sound design and polished mainstream storytelling
You need clear rules and tidy explanations
You’re impatient with slow, impressionistic pacing
Overview
Rose of Nevada is a ghost story about a place as much as a boat. Mark Jenkin turns a vanished fishing vessel into a portal for grief, labor history, and the uneasy feeling that some communities are being left behind by time itself. The premise is simple, but the film’s real subject is the stubborn persistence of the past in the present.
Worth noting
What makes it distinctive is the way it looks and sounds: rough-edged 16mm imagery, a haunted coastal palette, and a sense that the landscape is remembering things the characters cannot fully grasp. It’s less interested in explaining its time-slip than in letting you feel its emotional and social consequences.
Bottom line
For some viewers, that restraint will feel invigorating; for others, frustratingly elusive. But if you respond to films that treat atmosphere as argument, and that use genre to probe class, loss, and place, this is a striking and memorable piece of cinema.
Top Letterboxd reviews
Jay (4.5★) · 427 likes
coastal towns haunted by nostalgia and the industries that left them behind, a busy village pub can feel so eerie. mark jenkin photographs abandoned ports like they’re the prettiest place on earth. george mackay is making moves like no one else. dua lipa, i understand it now!
George Carmi (3★) · 300 likes
nyff63 #6
conceptually pretty cool but it never moved me past being slightly fascinated.
_modino (2★) · 281 likes
I imagined Dua Lipa watching this and pulling the same face as when that guy played music to her at Glastonbury
Jack Knightley (5★) · 241 likes
“If we don’t catch anything they don’t catch anything”
The time travel element serves not just as a plot point but a way to show an industry stuck in time with nothing to replace it. Mark Jenkin shows Cornwall for what it is- a nation regularly visited but never truly seen. With analogue 16mm colour film stock and no diegetic sound, he heightens visual and sensorial impacts with intervals of silence and layered sounds of nature and labour captured as… more
1949 · Thriller, Mystery · 1h 45m · NR · Curator 9.6/10 (377K ratings) · Where to watch: Amazon Prime Video, IndieFlix, Cineverse, Amazon Prime Video with Ads
A classic of postwar atmosphere and moral unease, where place itself seems to conceal the truth.