The movie-release calendar, though often arbitrarily assembled, can sometimes place seemingly unrelated works in meaningful proximity—and in conversation. By what I assume is a happy coincidence, rather than any shrewd connivance on the part of their American distributors, two richly complementary films from overseas have washed ashore this month. Both are coastal affairs, and together they form a most see-worthy midsummer double bill, brought to you by the color blue. “Romería,” from the Catalan director Carla Simón, takes place in and around Vigo, a city on Spain’s northwest shore, where the sun streams down on yachts, swimming pools, and other emblems of a family’s estimable wealth. “Rose of Nevada,” from the English filmmaker Mark Jenkin, trawls the waters near a dour Cornish village, where grotty fishing boats are lashed by torrential rains. Simón’s film is semi-autobiographical; Jenkin’s couldn’t possibly be. And yet both films are mysteries of a sort, predicated on hidden identities, distant tragedies, lost loved ones, and a whimsical element of time travel.
The protagonist of “Romería” is a sensitive, watchful eighteen-year-old, Marina (Llúcia Garcia)—named for the sea, of course, though which one is never made clear. Perhaps the Mediterranean, given that she was raised in Barcelona, by adoptive parents. Then again, maybe the Atlantic, near Vigo, where her biological parents met and fell in love. They were heroin users who died from AIDS when Marina was a young girl; she never met her father, Fon, and has only faint memories of her unnamed mother. When the film begins, in July, 2004, Marina has just arrived in Vigo, where she’s about to meet her relatives on Fon’s side, some of them for the first time. The visit is a matter of necessity: she’s headed to university in the fall, and, in order to secure a scholarship, she needs official acknowledgment of her lineage. For reasons that will take some time to piece together, her grandparents are not keen to recognize her.
Simón plots out the tensions and affinities within this sprawling family with an on-the-fly deftness that never feels diagrammatic; it takes a while to glean exactly how everyone’s related, but the details matter less than the emotional texture. We blanch at a thoughtless cousin who mocks Marina for avoiding drugs and alcohol, never wondering why the child of addicts might want to steer clear. And we warm to Marina’s more supportive aunt and uncles, even when their kindness feels clouded by guilt, regret, vague memories, and outright lies. What year did Fon pass, and why did he never come to Barcelona to visit his daughter before then? Is it true that Fon, like others whose families feared the stigmas of addiction and AIDS, was kept hidden away, to die in seclusion?
Marina, for her part, reacts to every new face and each fresh piece of information with an instinctive guardedness—and Garcia illuminates, with an almost sphinx-like half smile, the preternatural reserve of someone who’s grown up knowing not to expect too much from people. It’s a minor thrill when she actually pushes back, as when she calls out her well-meaning uncle Lois (Tristán Ulloa) for trying to brush aside a shameful secret, or when she seizes a moment of petty but satisfying revenge on her thoroughly contemptible grandmother (Marina Troncoso). Ultimately, though, Marina wants the least of what she’s due: an acknowledgment of identity that will secure her education, and quite possibly her future.
Yes, she may also be in search of dramatic material—and senses, correctly, that her family history is complex enough to provide it. In the final stretch of “Romería,” Simón ruptures her own cool, keen-eyed realism with a dazzling plunge into the past. We are suddenly in the nineteen-eighties, and Marina’s parents are before us, alive, if not entirely well—deeply in love with each other, but also with the substances that will prove their undoing. Marina’s father is played by Mitch Martín, who’s popped up earlier in the film as one of Marina’s cousins; Marina’s mother is played by Garcia herself. There’s a faintly incestuous frisson in the decision to cast the same two actors as cousins and lovers in different contexts, but the choice also conjures a kind of intergenerational paradox: only when we see ourselves reflected in our parents’ faces, perhaps, can we fully appreciate them as individuals in their own right. Back in the present, Marina leaves Vigo with a clutch of new relationships and an understanding of her own origins that had previously eluded her. You’re eager to see where she goes from here, and what films she makes next. Simón, too.
In the opening moments of “Rose of Nevada,” the title character, a rusty old fishing vessel with a cherry-red hull, is found moored in the harbor of a depressed-looking West Cornish village. Nothing too out of the ordinary, except that this particular boat hasn’t been seen since 1993, thirty years earlier, when it capsized—a tragedy from which the town has never recovered, spiritually or economically. How the Rose returned, seemingly none the worse for wear, is a total mystery. “Jesus Christ,” mutters the boat’s owner, Mike (Edward Rowe), and then, a few moments later: “She’s back.” A filmmaker in a cheekier mood might have written that line as “She’s baaaaaaack,” but Mark Jenkin brings an unwinking seriousness—and a rigorous sense of place and process—to every note of this unapologetically preposterous story, which he co-wrote with his longtime collaborator and partner, the actor Mary Woodvine. Even his musical instincts are those of a briny realist: the score, which he penned himself, sounds as ominous and incessant as a foghorn. It’s this commitment to physical verisimilitude that makes Jenkin’s sudden swerve into supernatural waters so startling—and so enveloping.
The resurfaced ghost ship, Mike decides, will be placed back in operation. Two young men are hired as crew members: Liam (Callum Turner), a sullen-faced drifter, and Nick (George MacKay), a sombre-eyed local who’s struggling to provide for his wife (Mae Voogd) and their young daughter. Their maiden voyage is improbably successful, the depleted waters somehow yielding a bountiful haul. Talk about something fishy, though it’s only back on dry land that the men realize what, exactly. The Rose of Nevada has transported them back to August, 1993—before the boat was lost, and before Nick was even born. The town is suddenly thriving: a pub is crowded with noisy patrons, and a present-day food bank has been restored to its former life as a post office. Compounding these mind-boggling impossibilities, the two men have been gifted new identities. Everyone mistakes Nick for Luke, who, in the other time line, survived the shipwreck and then died by suicide. (Woodvine, the lead of “Enys Men,” Jenkin’s psychological-horror film from 2022, resurfaces here as Luke’s loving mother.) Liam has slipped into the boots of another crew member, Alan, and thus into the home of Alan’s girlfriend, Tina (Rosalind Eleazar), and kid daughter, Jess.
Even before the chronology starts to go haywire, the film has the mood of the past in its chilly bones. Jenkin is a devoted multi-talent—here, as with “Bait” (2019) and “Enys Men,” he serves as his own cinematographer, editor, and composer—and his methods, rooted in primitive instruments and techniques, might be classified as their own form of cinematic time travel. He shot most of “Rose of Nevada” with a spring-wound 16-mm. Bolex camera, which accounts for both the lightly flickering grain of the images and the short duration of every shot. (Because the Bolex camera is operated by a crank, each shot lasts no more than twenty to thirty seconds.) The editing rhythms are clipped and almost metronomically precise; individual scenes feel less composed than synthesized from an array of swift, gestural fragments—a hand on a doorknob, a face at the window—which have the effect of heightening your attention. Each sequence becomes a puzzle that you solve by watching.
Jenkin is especially fond of intense closeups, which he uses not only to showcase his actors to great effect—Turner’s whatever-mate pessimism can be as mesmerizing as MacKay’s wide-eyed disbelief—but also to saturate us in small-town decay. Early on, he compels us to survey the grubby textures of peeling paint, rotting wood, and moldering drywall; later, at sea, he immerses us so fully in the arduousness of Nick and Liam’s labor that the movie comes to resemble an observational documentary, focussed on the winching of thick steel cables, the untying of newly filled nets, and, finally, the meticulous gutting of the ocean’s bounty (“from head to asshole,” the skipper instructs them). There’s a beguiling synchronicity between the two disciplines under scrutiny here—fishing and filmmaking—both of which, Jenkin reminds us, are strenuous physical activities, dependent on precise timing, know-how, energy, stamina, heavy-duty equipment, and a hardworking crew.
Even amid all this clanging machinery, the human element is never lost. Whenever the camera turns toward Eleazar’s Tina, her sadness exerts an often wordless emotional pull; she’s the reason why the previously untethered Liam is content to stay in this warped time line. Fate has bequeathed him a partner and a child he comes to love—just as it has separated Nick from his partner and child, possibly forever. (At one point, Nick attempts a form of time-travel communication that reminded me of the Korean romantic fantasy “Il Mare,” best known to American audiences as the movie that inspired the irresistibly drippy Keanu Reeves–Sandra Bullock vehicle “The Lake House.”)
But is there hope in starting over in an entirely new life? At one key moment, Nick envisions his wife standing before him on the docks, whispering, “There’s no time”—a line that, depending on how you read it, sounds either ominous or liberating. As a story of time and tide waiting for no man, “Rose of Nevada” is haunting, bittersweet, and a little scary. As a filmed object, it’s even more fascinating: a movie that, through the sheer idiosyncrasy of its construction and the implausibility of its existence, seems to both mourn and defy the medium’s decline. If cinema is a sinking vessel, as so many are eager to suggest, its rusty hull may yet contain treasures worth scraping off and scrutinizing anew. ♦
