Time-travel mystery a hallucinogenic trip

Here’s a spooky premise: A fishing boat, the Rose of Nevada, that disappeared along with its crew 30 years ago, makes a mysterious return — empty but unchanged — to a small village in Cornwall, on England’s southwest coast.

“She’s back,” the boat’s owner says ominously. Even more ominously, he doesn’t sound particularly surprised. It feels as if this has happened before.

There’s something unsettling going on in this strange and singular film. Cornish writer-director Mark Jenkin (Bait, Enys Men) has crafted a ghostly time-travel tale that collapses past and present, leaving his characters — and the audience — in haunting emotional and moral quandaries.

If the film’s sense of time can be deliberately hazy, its sense of place is very clear. All three of Jenkin’s features have been set in Cornwall, and there’s an intimate, immediate sense of connection to this coastal town, which is depressed and dwindling, its inhabitants beset by economic precarity. The harbour is deserted, the pub is empty, shop windows are boarded up and the young people are leaving. It seems as if the disappearance of that boat and crew broke not just the men’s grieving families but the whole community.

Maybe that’s why, after surreptitiously stripping the boat’s name off the hull, the owner has no trouble finding two young men who really need work. Nick (1917’s George MacKay) wants money to take care of his wife (Emily Daglish-Laine) and young daughter, and Liam (One Night Only’s Callum Turner) is a drifter who’s been sleeping rough. Along with a vaguely sinister skipper (played by Francis Magee, a fisherman before he became an actor), they head out to sea.

Three days later the men return to the same harbour, but they are — somehow — three decades in the past. Even more unnerving, the townspeople greet Nick and Liam as the men who went missing all those years ago.

Jenkin has set the men adrift in time. The 1990s harbour is now crowded with people and trucks, the pub packed, the main street lined with businesses. Liam, who has nothing to return to in the 2020s, is happy to claim a new identity that includes a readymade home with Tina (Slow Horses’ Rosalind Eleazar). Nick, though, has left behind his family, and he’s desperate to get back, even as it’s unclear whether that future still exists.

Time-travel stories, from Back to the Future to The Terminator to Groundhog Day, have always played around with temporal paradoxes and crazy causal loops. And this is art-house time-travel, so we get all those head-busting difficulties, along with an austere insistence on not explaining much.

Jenkin combines passages of hallucinatory eeriness with kitchen-sink working-class realism, especially around the hard labour of catching, gutting and icing fish. His debut feature, Bait, also took place in a hollowed-out Cornish fishing village, and one senses that much of the horror in Rose of Nevada is economic and social, an undertow of submerged grief at the loss of a way of life.

This is underlined by the look of the film. Jenkin uses an old-school spring-wound Bolex camera that delivers a grainy, textured analogue feel. He concentrates closely on physical evidence of time passing and the town becoming more impoverished, tracking signs of corrosion and decay, of peeling paint, rusting metal and weathered wood. These sequences — often using extreme closeups — feel hyper-real but also dreamy and weird.

Jenkin’s approach can be obstinately oblique. The narrative is understated — you need to work to figure out who everyone is and how they are related across time — and there is very little dialogue.

But MacKay and Turner anchor things with minimalist but moving performances, and a story that begins as confounding becomes more and more compelling, even as we move to an uncertain tomorrow.

arts@winnipegfreepress.com