It is “hard not to love” the Cornish auteur Mark Jenkin, said Kevin Maher in The Times. That isn’t just because he is a “one-man film industry” who writes, directs and edits his own work. Nor is it because of his remarkable signature style, which involves shooting on a hand-cranked 16mm Bolex camera, then hand-processing the stock to make it scratched and grainy, before adding “deviously complicated” sound design in post-production. The result is films – such as 2019’s “Bait” – that feel as if they were found in a rusted biscuit tin in a Cornish attic. “No, I love Jenkin because his films represent a startlingly distinctive expression of a certain English, indeed Cornish, identity – one seemingly lost yet cherished, fading from memory yet vitally present if only as a troubling recurring dream.”
This “terrifically atmospheric” drama opens in a decaying fishing village in the 2020s, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator. One day a trawler appears in the harbour. It is the Rose of Nevada, a boat that was lost 30 years earlier. The owner is mystified, but decides to put it back to use, so he hires two hands (George MacKay and Callum Turner) and sends them out with an old sea dog (Francis Magee). The trio catch an abundance of fish, but something is not right, and when they bring their haul in, they find the village not in their own time, but in 1993 – when it was thriving. Yet more weirdly, the younger men are greeted as though they are the boat’s original deckhands. One of them accepts this new reality; the other is desperate to get back to his young family in the present. An “almost biblical tale of sacrifice and loss”, the film is as “moving as it is unnerving”, said Rafa Sales Ross on Little White Lies. By the end, you will feel “quietly stunned” by Jenkin’s ethereal creation.
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