By Jorge Ignacio Castillo

Rose of Nevada (UK, 2020. Dir. Mark Jenkin): One of the most original British directors working today, Mark Jenkin is a no-fuss, small-town, big-themes filmmaker capable of creating otherworldly realities with the most basic of tools, chief among them a Bolex camera and 16mm film. The marriage of Jenkin's lo-fi sensibilities with England's rich folk horror tradition produced the auteur's best film to date, Enys Men.

But when a highly regarded indie filmmaker tries to break into the mainstream, the stakes change. Stretching a modest budget matters less than connecting with a broader audience. And Rose of Nevada doesn't quite get there.

Headlined by two of Britain's finest young actors—George MacKay and leading man-in-waiting Callum Turner—Rose of Nevada is deceptively simple. The title refers to a fishing vessel lost at sea for three decades that suddenly reappears one morning with none of its crew aboard.

After discovering the ship is still in remarkably good condition, its owner makes a few basic repairs and plans to send it back out to sea (have you learned nothing from every ghost ship story ever told?). There's just one problem: most of the town's men have already left, leaving only Nick (MacKay), an unemployed father; Liam (Turner), an apathetic drifter; and an elderly sailor (Francis Magee) who claims to have the experience to captain the voyage.

It should come as no surprise that the Rose of Nevada transports its newly minted fishermen back to the moment the ship first disappeared. The crew's reactions differ: Nick is desperate to return home, Liam sees it as an opportunity to reinvent himself, and the captain’s bonhomie turns shadier by the minute.

Rose of Nevada is the anti-Primer (the über complicated time-travelling film by the once promising Shane Carruth.) Jenkin treats the time-loop premise as little more than a narrative device to deliver a simple message: in a world divided between those who contribute to their community and those who exploit it, strive to be the former.

Unfortunately, Jenkin's spartan storytelling drains much of the fun from the premise. Moral conflict and grim realism take precedence over the wonderfully bizarre idea of a time-travelling fishing boat, and the characters do surprisingly little with their knowledge of the future. (They go back to the '90s. Apple stock is sitting right there.)

Overall, it's easy to admire Rose of Nevada for its discipline and its determination to ground an outlandish premise in something meaningful. But at the end of the day it feels like homework. ★★½☆☆

Rose of Nevada is now playing at the TIFF Lightbox (Toronto) and the VIFF Centre (Vancouver).