Mark Jenkin’s *The Rose of Nevada* is full of things that look as if they ought to mean something. The dangerous bit is assuming they do.
A fishing boat reappears in a Cornish village decades after vanishing, heads back out to sea, and somehow brings its new crew into the past. One man gains the family he never had. Another loses the wife and child he desperately wants back. The strange thing is how little Jenkin treats any of this like a grand supernatural event. It just happens, and everyone has to work out what sort of life they have landed in.
That same quiet oddness is everywhere. On land, Jenkin’s 16mm images are almost unnervingly still: faces, hands, rusting bollards, knackered nets, empty buildings. At sea, everything starts moving. The camera pitches with the boat, bodies strain, hands grip, veins stand out. The tension is often in an arm or a clenched hand rather than somebody doing Serious Acting with their face.
Then there is Mogi, who barely seems to belong to ordinary time at all. He stays with the boat, appears to understand far more than he bothers explaining, and mostly seems interested in getting on with the fishing. And then there are the fish themselves. They spill from the nets conspicuously dead.
Budget problem? Possibly. Meaningful clue? Also possibly. But Jenkin leaves the camera on them long enough to make us suspicious, which is frankly all the encouragement FolknHell needs. Once you start wondering whether this is a repeat of something that has already happened, dead fish suddenly become rather more interesting than dead fish have any right to be.
That is where *The Rose of Nevada* really gets under the skin. The village itself is waiting for something to come back. Mike and Tina remain among the rust, empty pub and food bank as if the old community might somehow return. Then the impossible happens and the past does come back, except not neatly and certainly not fairly.
As folk horror, that works for us. The place matters. The belief matters. Outsiders arrive and disturb what the place thinks it knows about itself. But the horror is less about ancient ritual than the possibility that history might give you another go and still leave you wondering whether you have been saved or trapped.
Slow, peculiar, beautiful and absolutely stuffed with tiny things worth worrying at, *The Rose of Nevada* is the sort of film where you can spend ten minutes arguing about the chronology and somehow like it more afterwards. That may be the recommendation.
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Reviewed by [**FolknHell**](https://www.folknhell.com/), the folk horror film podcast.
Hear the full FolknHell podcast discussion of *RoseOf Nevada*, along with our other reviews, transcripts and episodes, at [**folknhell.com**](http://folknhell.com).
Please note this episode was/will be published on Sep 3rd 2026