The chronology of water: "Rose of Nevada"

Oddities Week continues with Rose of Nevada, Cornish auteur Mark Jenkin's distinctive take on the ghost-ship subgenre. Jenkin's previous films Bait and Enys Men were set in workaday South West coastal communities beset by social division and supernatural anomalies; collectively, they formed a heartening revival of both a rudimentary film technique (hand-developed film, post-synched sound) and the kind of regional filmmaking that fell out of fashion and favour once everybody else determined they had to go and seek their fortune in London. But now, armed with a BAFTA and an all-access festival pass, Jenkin is himself going places. His latest, shot in vibrant Nic Roeg Technicolor, introduces emergent, adventurous faces (George Mackay, Callum Turner) into this director's familiar milieu: a well-worn fishing village, here one where the trawler of the title, previously involved in a tragedy thirty years ago, has found its way back into harbour with zero hands on deck. Still, the approach remains so distinct from what's around it in the contemporary cinema that it takes a good fifteen-to-twenty minutes to resettle into the Jenkin way; the opening section has to teach us anew how to watch a film removed of all the usual fuss and clutter. What's noticeable - and surprising, even to those of us who saw Jenkin's previous films - is how much Jenkin conveys via his generally taciturn, square-framed, rough-edged close-ups. We sense, for starters, just how this community has split along generational lines, the chatty younger folk itching to talk about the tragedies befalling the local fishermen, even as their elders clam up. (One exception: a lank-haired dementia patient/seer, prone to confusing present and past, as this plot will eventually.) More striking yet: how these shots come to establish a loaded, ominous mood, borne out when a new three-man crew - grizzled captain Francis Magee and hired hands Mackay and Turner - cast off in this same cursed vessel. Etched into the wooden frame of one of the bunks the lads sleep in: a stark warning to "Get Off The Boat Now".

At which point, a fierce local knowledge - or muscle memory - kicks in. This is a trawlerman movie made by someone who's studied how these boats actually work; with its documentary-like coverage of the gulls above and the ropes and pulleys below, the film Rose most closely resembles, for long stretches at sea, is 2012's immersive experiment Leviathan. The old ways become new, pertinent and urgent again - especially once our boys return home and realise they've docked in the recent past. Something's gone adrift; bearings start to be lost. If the narrative is far from plain sailing, Jenkin's shot selection - comprising four weatherbeaten or otherwise textured close-ups to every one suggestive, Deren-like sliver of dream imagery - begins to feel like necessary ballast, exactly what this director needed to tell this particular story. (Here are shots that appear the results of several weeks' beachcombing, visual information laid out as plainly as it would be on the sands; every image is its own seashell or fossil.) And the actors put in a real shift. Few films have made better use of - and more closely relied on - Mackay's open-faced legibility, the actor set to looking ever more aghast at developments. That quality becomes doubly effective when set against the vague air of fecklessness given off by the squintier, shiftier Turner - the market-stall Richard Gere - as a young man only too prepared to go along with this new arrangement, which is to say the old arrangement, if it means sleeping with a dead man's wife. (Arguably, these youngsters are overshadowed by another cherishably characterful turn from Magee, the Bob Mitchum of the cream tea set.) If Rose of Nevada turns out to be a hit, as my packed first-weekend screening would indicate, that may partly be down to star names, and partly down to being horror/fantasy-adjacent: on some basic level, we're dealing with a brinier Brigadoon here. Yet it's also surely attributable to Jenkin attempting what few others have of late: his is a cinema that continues to speak, on some sublimated, unconscious level, to the choppy waters and backwash we're all passing through. Some of the new film's tensions are regional: you do come away with a sense of those pressures felt by the young in crumbling coastal communities to stay in place and knuckle down. But it also strikes me as significant that Jenkin has been a post-Brexit discovery. Steered by a crew of queasy and uneasy shipmates, Rose of Nevada proves unusually attuned to what it means - and how it feels - for a people to be living in the present and the past simultaneously.

Rose of Nevada is now playing in selected cinemas.