'Rose of Nevada' is a wondrous lo-fi sci-fi horror | NYFF review

NYFF 2025 | Mark Jenkin's sophomore feature follows two men that inadvertently travel back to the past on a once-missing fishing boat.

There is a strange magic to Mark Jenkin’s Rose of Nevada, which had its U.S. premiere at the 2025 New York Film Festival. The premise sounds almost deceptively simple: a fishing boat that disappeared in 1993 suddenly returns to shore, and two fishermen who board it find themselves transported back to that same year. What follows is technically a time-travel movie, but Jenkin has very little interest in that aspect of the story—and all for the better. The less we understand the mechanics, the more unsettling the whole Rose of Nevada becomes.

John Carpenter’s The Fog, one of his most underrated, had the same pastiche as Rose of Nevada. Jenkin, like Carpenter, uses a coastal community haunted by something that has returned from its past to tell a story about repression and ignorance. The boat becomes an object of collective memory, a physical reminder of an old tragedy that nobody has really escaped. There is the same sense that the sea is holding onto something, and that sooner or later it is going to give it back.

But where Carpenter turns that idea into supernatural horror, Jenkin pushes it somewhere more Lynchian as time folds over itself. Family man Nick (George MacKay) and would-be family man Liam (Callum Turner) interact with their new world like they wandered into somebody else’s dream. Like Lynch, Jenkin understands that explaining the nightmare can make it less frightening. Rose of Nevada is much more interested in the feeling that something is profoundly wrong, but no one else sees it.

Shot on 16mm, Rose of Nevada is saturated with deep reds, bruised blues, muddy greens and heavy shadows. The colors have an almost unreal intensity, especially against the rust, grime and gray skies of the Cornish fishing village. Jenkin’s camera makes everything feel simultaneously beautiful and decayed. The horror isn’t presented as scares, rather as a slow realization that nothing is right.

Underneath the surrealism is a surprisingly grounded story about capitalism, sacrifice and community. The village has been hollowed out by economic decline, and the return of the Rose of Nevada offers the possibility of salvation while also reopening wounds that never healed. Jenkin asks what a community owes its individual members, and what individuals owe a community that has failed them.

George MacKay is terrific as Nick, giving the movie an emotional center without ever feeling overwrought. His face becomes the movie’s most important special effect: confusion, fear, desperation and grief slowly accumulating as he realizes that the past has swallowed his future.

Rose of Nevada is eerie, gorgeous and deliberately strange. It feels like a ghost story, a science-fiction movie and a Cornish folk tale all occupying the same haunted little boat. And sometimes, like The Fog, the best explanation is simply: don’t go out to sea.

Rose of Nevada is playing at the 2025 New York Film Festival. Get information about screenings here.