By Thomas M. Puhr.
Like their traditional method of travel, Nick and Liam’s temporal destination underlines Jenkin’s disinterest in sci-fi spectacle.”
Time travel stories naturally conflate space and time. In such narratives, the non-present is like a location—the word “travel” itself suggests physical movement to a place either behind (the past) or ahead of (the future) its protagonists. (Even if we remove this sci-fi element from the equation, it’s difficult not to physicalize [anthropomorphize?] time. “Wait until tomorrow,” you may tell someone, as if “tomorrow” were a thing moving toward a stationary “you.”) In The Weird and the Eerie, Mark Fisher explains how “the threshold between worlds is the apparatus that allows travel between different time periods—which may be a time machine, or which could actually be a kind of time-crossing door or gate.”[1] A time machine, then, is basically a car: a vehicle that takes you from point A to point B on the temporal map—point B being tomorrow rather than, say, Japan.
Mark Jenkin’s hypnotic, remarkable Rose of Nevada (2025) literalizes this metaphor: Its “time machine” isn’t some techno-futuristic marvel but a fishing boat, its “threshold” not a “time-crossing door or gate” but simply the sea. Its characters and plot, fittingly, are also grounded in the everyday. Two Cornish laborers, Nick (George MacKay, whose spheric, bald head and angular face call to mind Aleksandr Kaydanovskiy in Stalker [1979]) and Liam (Callum Turner), join old salt Murgey (Francis Magee) on a fishing expedition aboard the titular trawler. Their days at sea are mostly unremarkable: They cast the net out, haul it in, and gut the trapped fish; Murgey barks orders; Nick has a weird dream. Upon their return, Nick and Liam realize that their small coastal town has somehow reverted to its 1993 self. (Murgey, ominously, doesn’t seem to notice or care; he stays aboard the boat.)
Like their traditional method of travel, Nick and Liam’s temporal destination underlines Jenkin’s disinterest in sci-fi spectacle. His characters are taken to neither the far past nor far future, but merely to a few years before they were born: Besides some dated clothing and a more robust economy, things look about the same. Even a local businessman, Mike (Edward Rowe), sports the same mustache and earring. Moreover, our heroes’ motives for (unwillingly) undertaking this mission are commonplace. Liam, whom we glimpse sleeping in a shed before he secures the fishing job, appears to be homeless, and Nick needs some extra cash to repair a broken roof in his apartment. These guys aren’t trying to escape a dying planet (ala Interstellar [2014]) or save humanity from a deadly virus (ala Twelve Monkeys [1995]). They’re just trying to make ends meet. In this sense, the film—with its folding of the fantastical within the mundanity of small-town life—has more in common with “A Stop At Willoughby,” the famous 1960 Twilight Zone episode in which a depressed salesman drives his car into the picturesque, all-American neighborhood of his childhood, than it does with the abovementioned blockbusters. Let’s call it the banality of time travel.
Anyone familiar with the director’s wholly singular work, however, can tell you that his aesthetics are anything but banal. Like his previous features, Rose of Nevada was shot (by Jenkin) on 16mm. Be it the vibrant red of the boat, the shining yellow of the fishermen’s rain-drenched slickers, or the sparkling, stunning turquoise of the sea (I wanted to dive into that impossibly blue water), rich primary colors saturate every shot: colors more real than in life. Also like these films, all sounds were post-dubbed (again, by Jenkin). Having not been made simultaneously, the sounds and images literally don’t “go” together: a disjunction that both figuratively echoes the characters’ out-of-placeness and medially embodies Fisher’s definition of the weird as “the presence of that which does not belong.”[2] This method’s beautiful imperfections—a scratch on the frame, a tinny voice—remind us that celluloid, like any other object (or person), is subject to the degradations of time.
From this heady audiovisual brew, Jenkin summons stunning tableaux. Consider a scene in which Nick crashes through the hole in his roof (like the sea, this portal-like opening is another everyday “object” imbued with temporal mystery) and lands on his feet in the apartment kitchen. After he turns to face his awestruck daughter and shocked wife, rain abruptly falls through the hole and drenches him (another echo, perhaps, of Stalker—specifically, the sequence in which Tarkovsky’s world-weary Zone visitors sit back-to-back under a broken roof during a rainstorm). Such moments are almost overwhelmingly immersive and tactile.
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Once Nick and Liam arrive in 1993, Jenkin introduces his stripped-down take on what Fisher calls “the time travel paradox story.” This subgenre’s central paradox—in which “the orderly distinction between cause and effect is fatally disrupted”[3]—often involves a character going into the past and unknowingly creating the very present they leave at the beginning of the narrative. The effects of their journey manifest themselves in the present before they go back in time. For many film fans, James Cameron’s The Terminator (1984) offers the prototypical example of this trope: After traveling to pre-apocalyptic Los Angeles, Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) falls in love with and impregnates Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), thus fathering John Connor—the military leader who sent (or is it “will send”?) Kyle on his mission in the first place. Here, effect (futuristic Kyle fighting killer robots under John’s leadership) precedes cause (Kyle fathering John in the ’80s).
A similar plot twist occurs in Rose of Nevada when Liam, marooned in 1993, fathers a child with a local woman named Tina (Rosalind Eleazar); the grown version of their daughter, who is about the same age as Liam, features in a few early scenes. (Despite his arthouse esotericism, Jenkin is by no means above referencing classic genre fare; see Enys Men [2022], with its many echoes of Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man [1973].) Effect causes cause in Nick’s story, too. Before setting sail in 2025, he reads a message—carved into one of the boat’s beds—advising him not to go on the fishing trip. Later, we realize that 1993 Nick is the one who left the words of warning.
Whether unraveling these paradoxes (If Nick reads the carved message, then doesn’t that mean he can’t get off the boat before it’s too late? If the daughter exists in 2025, then doesn’t Liam have to impregnate Tina in 1993?) entertains or infuriates you, there’s no denying that such mental gymnastics are intended to do more than hurt your brain. They also underscore one of time travel’s central philosophical preoccupations—namely, the limits of human agency. After all, how can someone possibly claim to have free will if their future is already trapped in the amber of the past?
Fisher claims that a character in a time paradox story cannot “process that everything he will do … has already happened. … To be a subject is to be unable to think of oneself as anything but free—even if you know that you are not.”[4] Nick may be doomed to read those self-directed words of warning in 2025, but that doesn’t stop him from hoping he’ll be back in the present every time he returns from a fishing expedition in 1993. (Yes, he and Liam continue going to work. A Marxist reading may point to how such backbreaking labor renders their identities not just inconsequential, but interchangeable.) If freedom is a chimera, then the best reaction—the only reaction, perhaps, that we’re mentally capable of having—is to pretend otherwise.
Jenkin compounds this deterministic outlook by stripping away his protagonists’ ability to control not only where/when they go but also who they are. In 1993, Nick and Liam are called by the names of two fishermen missing and presumed dead at the beginning of the film (that is, in 2025). The former has assumed the identity of his neighbors Mr. and Mrs. Richards’ (Adrian Rawlins and Mary Woodvine) son, the latter that of Tina’s husband.[5] The two react quite differently to their shared predicament. Nick is bereft, desperate to reunite with his daughter and wife in the present. Liam, however, is in no rush to return, now that he has a beautiful family waiting for him back home. There’s a fascinating symmetry, a balancing of the cosmic scales, to this reversal: One man’s loss is quite literally another man’s gain.
Nick’s and Liam’s adopted personae elicit even more questions. Have the two transformed into the missing fishermen, or have they somehow always been them? (Fisher cites Jack Torrance’s fate in The Shining [1980]—that he has “always been the caretaker”—as an embodiment of this type of paradox.) Since Nick and Liam look nothing like their predecessors, is it possible that the missing fishermen have taken their place in 2025?[6] Whether we’re talking about four characters here or two, are they all doomed to disappear at sea?
Rose of Nevada is replete with other doublings: Tina actually has two daughters, both played by Yana Penrose as adults; secondary characters, like Mike, are “doubled” in that we see both their past and present selves. Even its final line—“There is no time”—suggests a dual meaning: the first figurative (time is an illusion), the second grounded in everyday speech (time is running out). These four words encapsulate how the supernatural and prosaic are not at odds, but—like past and present, or the protagonists’ new identities—of a piece. They’re all a part of the same turning wheel.
Endnotes
[1] Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie (London: Repeater Books, 2016), 40.
[2] Ibid, 61.
[3] Ibid, 40.
[4] Ibid, 44.
[5] This twist reminded me of a dream in which I understood, without anyone having to verbalize it, that a woman who looked and behaved nothing like my mother was my mother. Somehow, within the dream’s (il)logic, I just knew.
[6] Mrs. Richards circa 2025 excitedly talks about seeing her boy again soon: a mysterious line that lends some credence to this interpretation.
Thomas M. Puhr lives in Chicago, where he teaches English and language arts. A regular contributor to Bright Lights Film Journal, he has published Fate in Film: A Deterministic Approach to Cinema with Wallflower Press.