Parky At the Pictures (24/4/2026)

(Reviews of Rose of Nevada; Gioia mia; and London's Last Wilderness)

ROSE OF NEVADA.

Even for its most ardent admirers, Enys Men (2022) felt anticlimactic after the brilliance of Mark Jenkin's debut feature, Bait (2019). The Cornish auteur continues to put his distinctive artisanal avant-garde stamp on genre cinema with Rose of Nevada, on which he serves as his own writer, 16mm cinematographer, editor, composer, and post-production sound designer. Working with established stars, as well as familiar faces from his local ensemble, Jenkin blends sci-fi and social realism to compelling effect, in a manner that is entirely unique to himself, a claim that few film-makers can make in this age of CEO- and CGI-driven identicalism.

Following a montage of close-ups of rust, rope, and encrustation that epitomise the sense of decay that has overtaken a declining Cornish fishing village, Mike (Edward Rowe) spots a trawler in the harbour. This wouldn't be unusual, apart from the fact that `Rose of Nevada' went missing at sea in 1993, with its shorthanded crew of two being presumed lost.

With a barometer reading `unsettled', Nick Dyer (George MacKay) collects a box from the food bank and brings Mrs Richards (Mary Woodvine) in from the rain and wife Emily (Mae Voogd) dries her off while opening a chocolate biscuit for her young daughter. As Nick puts the washing-up bowl on the floor to catch a drip from the cracked ceiling, Mrs Richards whispers that her boy is coming home.

Meanwhile, husband Billy (Adrian Rawlins) lays a bunch of flowers on the cliff edge from which their son, Luke, had thrown himself out of guilt at missing Rose of Nevada's ill-fated voyage. Mike goes to see Tina (Rosalind Eleazar), who had lost her husband at sea, and they agree to find a crew to get the boat working again. She tells daughter, Linsey (Yana Penrose), who is a new mother herself, that he would have been proud of her. Sister Jess (also Penrose) is sitting in the pub when Mike gives her the red baseball cap that her father had worn on the boat.

Billy comes to collect his wife and tells Nick about how different the village had been in its heyday. However, he insists there's no point dwelling on the past, as the only way is forward, although Nick isn't so sure, having climbed up to the roof and made the hole worse with his clumsy fumbling. So, having fallen through into the kitchen when trying to patch the roof, Nick signs up to crew the boat (whose name plate has been removed and chucked into the harbour) with skipper Murgey (Frances Magee) and Liam (Callum Turner), a drifter who had wandered into the village and flirted with Jess in the pub. As he leaves, Nick runs into Mrs Richards, who mistakes him for Luke and reminds him about the burden he bears for leaving the crew shorthanded back in 1993 before warning him about going out in a cursed vessel.

Nick is almost in a trance as he comes aboard and Mike waves them off. With its white cabin atop a red hull, the boat looks tiny, as it bobs out of the harbour, with Mrs Richards watching from her bedroom window. As he unpacks his bag, Nick finds the words, `Get Off the Boat Now' carved into the wood of his bunk. He watches Murgey wind the nets out and helps Liam gut the fish when they make a bumper catch. Somewhere along the line, however, the name plate returns and Murgey starts to look a little younger. Nick hears a whisper about the boat that never came back, but is too busy to take notice and slumps back on his bunk after they fill the hold with boxes of iced fish, like in the good old days.

Waking from a nap, Nick notices the carved warning has disappeared. But he seems oblivious to the fact that the harbour is a hive of activity when NC73 lands, with other boats loading their crates into trucks. Even the lighthouse has regained its red-and-white hoops, while sign for The Ship looks glossy, instead of faded. The post office is back where the food bank had been and the house in which he lived with Emily is empty and up for sale. Billy and Mike bundle him into the Richards house and look askance when he claims to be Nick not Luke. But he sees the date on the local paper is 1993 (three years before he was born) and he is baffled how he has managed to slip through time. His mother tries to calm Luke down, while Mike wonders if Denver hadn't worked them too hard on the voyage.

Liam seems less bothered about being called `Alan' by Tina, who orders him away from the heaving pub to come home with their daughter, Jess. He decides not to spend the night, but gives Tina his pay when he bumps into her while buying provisions for the next trip and Nick looks on bemused as they kiss. Unsure what to do, he agrees to go out on the boat again, in the hope it will deposit him back in 2023. Once again, they land a bumper catch and Nick works hard filling the hold with 27 boxes. Nick also cooks supper and the skipper is appeciative. When Nick asks whether he's called Murgey or Denver, he proves evasive, as he does with their names. But he reminds Nick to keep his wits about him, as every man at sea has five people relying on his on the land and he puts his back into landing the last haul before they head `home to mother'.

Confused as to why Liam seems content to accept their fate, Nick has a bad dream before being woken by the skipper because a storm is brewing. It proves rough and they have to haul Murgey back on desk after he's washed overboard. But they survive by cutting the line to a tangled net and head home without a catch. Lying on his bunk, Nick carves `Get Off the Boat Now' into the wood and puts the cash he's been paid into an envelope in which his daughter had left him a note saying she loves him. He posts this and takes refuge in the empty house next door, despite the Richards knocking to ask for his housekeeping. He has another dream, in which the skipper has changed to the one Nick had seen in a photo in Luke's old room. He turns to see Liam on the deck and wakes wondering whether he had just been on Rose of Nevada the night she lost her crew.

When Liam had tried to tell Tina about what is going on, she shuts him down, as she's happy with the way things are. But he's pleased to see her when they dock and he punchs Nick when he reminds him what had happened to the original crew. Mike takes a picture of Nick and Liam on the deck and the former realises that they are being held here because they have brought the other fishermen luck, as they only catch fish when they do. He wants to get back to Emily, but knows if he leaves, he will leave NC73 shorthanded and history will repeat itself and he will have to live with the knowledge. Finding the envelope on the doorstep, Nick goes to the cliffs and contemplates jumping before he sees the flowers that Billy had left. Crying because he feels he no longer knows who or where he is, Nick returns to breakfast with the Richards. Leaving them some cash, he tells them that they'll be okay as long as the sun comes up in the morning and repeats Billy's words about the futility of looking backwards.

Arriving at the harbour, Nick agrees to come back aboard, as Mike and Murgey tease Liam about the fact that he's failed to link Tina being sick with her being pregnant. As the boat is about to leave, he sees Emily standing beside him with their daughter. He goes to reach out a hand, but she whispers, `There's no time,' as Mike throws his bag on the deck and he jumps down as they cast off. Rose of Nevade chugs away, as Nick look up from the deck, feeling trapped by his sacrifice.

Although the storyline of this timeslip saga is no more sophisticated than an average episode of The Twilight Zone, plentiful compensation is available elsewhere. As we have come to expect from Mark Jenkin, the visuals are fascinating, with light and colour flares popping occasionally among the studious close-ups of objects and faces, the evocative views of the Cornish landscape, and the telltale physical reminders that we are watching a piece of film. The contrasts between the time frames are deftly achieved by production designer Felicity Hickson and costumier Jo Thompson, and help Jenkin identify the `then and now' points that give the film its socio-political potency.

Unlike many, Jenkin resists sandbagging the audience with his thematic references, even allowing a clip of Christopher Walken from David Cronenberg's The Dead Zone (1983) to explore the pivotal notions of time, memory, and our inability to change the past. But, each meticulously composed shot has something to say, if you can hear it above the immersively cacophonous sound of the clanking chains, winding ropes, and spluttering chugs of the fishing boat. Even ticking clocks thud ominously to reinforce the irresistible impingement of time and the unsettling effects it can have on things like Liam's relationship with Jess and the sense of community that can see everyone chipping in to repair a torn net in 1993 and barely giving each other the time of day in 2023.

Wisely, Jenkin makes no attempt to explain how the lost boat has returned or why the rootless Liam opts to settle down as Alan, while Nick is unable to get back to Emily. Such ambiguity also enables the viewer to regard Nick's plight as either a noble gesture or a conspiratorial plot on behalf of the villagers past to keep him as a sort of lucky charm, who is sacrificed (like Edward Woodward's cop in The Wicker Man, 1973) for the greater good. However, Jenkin is also reminding us that, while we indulge our fetishistic approach to nostalgia, we are also playing fast and loose with the future, with our refusal to heed warnings about climate change and the consequences of non-stop consumption and gratification.

Often required to look puzzled in unrelenting close-up, George MacKay does more heavy lifting plotwise than Callum Turner, whose transformation from footloose chancer to family man is rather shortchanged. But each sheds his stellar aura in order to catch the idiosyncratic tone that Jenkin demands of his performers. As for the director, he continues to carve his cinematic circumbendibus with an analogue singularity that will leave many curious to see where his route will bend next.

GIOIA MIA.

Born in Palermo, but raised in Rome, Margherita Spampinato worked as a production secretary and a casting director on around 30 features while directing the shorts, Tommasina (2009) and Segreti (2011). She has now made her feautre bow and Gioia mia/Sweetheart is the latest little gem unearthed by CinemaItaliaUK.

Heartbroken because babysitter Violetta (Camille Dugay) has returned to Paris to get married, tweenager Nico (Marco Fiore) is dispatched from Milan to Sicily to stay with his Great-Aunt Gela (Aurora Quattrocchi). She lives in an apartment building that is supposedly haunted, but the priest won't come to exorcise it, even though they drive Gela's dog, Frank, to distraction. Dismayed by the lack of Wi-Fi, the old-fashioned food, and a spooky Sacred Heart picture on his bedroom wall, Nico reluctantly tries on his new pyjamas for an afternoon nap after Gela ticks him off for wearing nail polish and for playing video games on his phone.

When they go for a stroll, Gela tells Nico about his grandmother, Adele, who died giving birth to Agostino, who also failed to survive. Nico's father had promised to name his son after his lost brother, but he hadn't kept his word. Bored waiting while Gela talks to the priest, Nico refuses to play football with some local children after Rosa (Martina Ziami) gives him a long, hard stare. Instead, he comes home to play with his phone and complain to his mother that she has sent him back to the Dark Ages.

Despite his frustrations, Nico is intrigued by the way Frank barks when he senses something in the room and he notices the light fitting swaying gently, as though in a draft. However, he gets scared when he hears him in the night and Gela has to get out a camp bed so he can sleep in her room. When it starts to thunder, Nico helps her bring in the sheets drying on the balcony and he bridles when she says they have to iron them. Feeling too hot to sleep, Nico asks if they can chat and Gela blames Violetta for teaching him a bad habit. He asks why she doesn't have children and wonders if it was because she was ugly. Snorting, Gela claims to have had lots of suitors, although she is reluctant to reply when Nico demands to know if she has ever kissed anyone on the lips. Tutting, she suggests that Nico lulls himself to sleep by thinking of all the kisses he will share.

Waking to find that Gela has gone out, Nico makes a mess trying to cook eggs and heat milk, As Gela tells him off, he smashes a vase that had been an heirloom and she marches him downstairs to play with Rosa when she goes to church. Blindfolding him, Rosa and three younger boys taunt Nico in the courtyard and pour water over his legs. Stomping off, he sits by Gela's door until she returns and gets cross because he had missed a call from his dad. She calls him a `wuss' for being bested by smaller kids and he despairs of her because she always insists on having the last word.

Bored enough to help with the ironing, Nico turns down an invitation from Masuccia (Clara Salvo) to join the others at the beach. Gela teaches him to play Briscola and vows to keep hold of his phone until he beats her. But she has to go out and Nico finds the phone after a prolonged search and pleads with Violetta to call him. Instead, Rosa comes to the door and pushes her way inside. She wants to know why he won't come out and tells him that the shivers he feels are caused by passing spirits. Impressed that Nico has a phone, she asks if she can play the zombie game and they sit together on the sofa.

Gela teaches Nico how to make his bed and cook some simple dishes. She is wary, however, when he wanders in to find her using Tarot cards with Mariula (Concetta Ingrassia) and Lia (Renata Sajeva). They ask Nico to pick a card and they tell Gela that The Eyeless Lady is crucial to removing the spirits from the building, as her secret needs to be revealed. Curious, but confused, Nico asks Rosa to play bricola when Gela goes out. However, she wants to see what's inside a box on the old lady's wardrobe and they find a camera and lots of monochrome photographs of Gela and Adele and Rosa comes to the conclusion that both women were in love with the photographer.

Joining the boys in the courtyard, Rosa suggests that the venture into the abandoned apartment. But they decide to sneak into Mrs Halfdead's rooms and dress up in her clothes and bounce on the bed before they hear a noise and beat a hasty retreat. Nico asks Rosa about the spirits and she teases him about being scared. He protests, but is nervous about going into the empty apartment across from Gela.

Cross with Gela for not returning his phone when he beats her at Briscola, Nico calls her a liar and tells her that he has found the photos of Adele. He wants to know why she keeps them hidden when the other old ladies have frames galore in their rooms. Gela informs him that it's none of his business and he flounces off to play with Rosa. The other boys taunt him for being too afraid to enter the abandoned apartment, but he insists he's game and Rosa cuts him some slack when he lets her believe that he's only in Sicily because Violetta had died.

The next day, Rosa shows Nico how to use her grandma's x-ray to open the latch and they explore the abandoned rooms by torchlight. He feels exhilarated, yet panics when he momentarily can't find her. But he's relieved when they slip out and he returns to find Gela looking through her photos. She explains that she and Adele took the pictures of each other and confides that, when someone dies, they take a little piece of you with them that can never be replaced. They go for a walk and Geli tells Nico how people had accused her and Adele of being lovers because they were so close. Her brother had taken her away and she never saw Adele again because she died in childbirth. As he feels bereaved because he'll never see Violetta again, Nico says he understands and is pleased that he is the only person Gela has ever told about Adele.

He keeps finding Frank asleep on his bed in the morning and no longer thinks he's a stupid dog. Rosa calls with the x-ray and they break into Mrs Halfdead's rooms. They play with her Zimmer frame and wrap themselves in the billowing curtains until they hear a hacking cough and see Mrs Halfdead make her way to the kitchen using a wooden chair for support and they realise this was the noise they had taken for spirits scraping. They play tick among the sheets drying on the roof until they hear someone calling because Frank has died. Nico runs down to console Gela, but she doesn't even notice him, as she walks past with her beloved pet wrapped in a blanket.

Nico cooks one of the dishes that Gela had taught him and lays the table for a surprise supper. But she refuses to leave her bed and the other grandmas explain that she will need a grief cookie when she stops feeling so sad. He leaves a tray beside her bed, but Gela is too distraught to notice. Returning to his room, Nico lies on the bed and smiles quietly to himself when he hears the chair scraping the floor in the apartment above.

The next day, Nico does the ironing and attempts to sweep the floor. He brings Gela a fresh handkerchief, only for his phone to ring. It's Violetta calling to say she misses him and confirm that they probably won't meet again after she marries. Trying to be brave, Nico opens the door to find Rosa with a meal cooked by her grandma. She hugs him and says it must be hard coping with the memories of Violetta while Gela is mourning Frank. He leans into her and promises to join the others when he feels better.

Feeling part of the gang for the first time, Nico joins in the game of football. But he catches Rosa's eye when Gela comes on to the balcony and calls down that Violetta is on the phone for him. He races after her, as she runs away feeling foolish for believing his lie. He bangs on her door, but Masuccia tells him off and he comes home to throw the contents of a jar over the floor in frustration. Still locked in her room, Gela asks him to tell her a joke and she comes out to help him clear up.

Ready to face the world again, Gela takes Nico to the beach. The grandmas and the kids greet them both, but Rosa turns her nose up at him. He sits with his great-aunt and watches the others play. Eventually, Masuccia turfs him out of his deckchair and makes him sit on the sand. She calls Rosa over and talks Nico through a proper apology. After making him suffer, Rosa accepts and they scamper off to play hide and seek. As they're crouching down behind a parked car, Nico gives Rosa a little peck on the mouth and she smiles as he runs off to touch base before he's caught. She runs after him and, as `The Blue Danube' starts up on the soundtrack, they run into the sea and start splashing, as Nico turns to check that Gela is okay nattering with her friends.

Although Margherita Spampinato based her screenplay partly on her memories of Sicilian holidays with her two maiden aunts and partly on the things she had overheard her young son discussing with his friends, this marvellous first feature also contains echoes of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, Carla Simón's Summer 1993 (2007), and Gianni Di Gregorio's Mid-August Lunch (2008). The blend works like a charm, as Nico comes to reconcile his secular preoccupations with Gela's faith and realise that they have more in common than he had first imagined.

Using her casting nous, Spampinato knew instinctively that Marco Fiore was right for the sulkily self-pitying tweenager plunged into a milieu that makes no sense because his cosseted background and reliance on his phone have robbed him of the sense of curiosity that his great-aunt revives with her no-nonsense conviction in her own way of doing things and her recognition that Nico is as fragile as his father had been when she had raised him. Relishing a role written with her in mind, Aurora Quattrocchi excels as the soft-hearted martinent with a secret agony of her own and she thoroughly deserved her Golden Leopard for the Best Performance at the Locarno Film Festival.

Martina Ziami, Clara Salvo, and King the dog all make vital contributions, as do production designer Marinora Ferrandes, composer Alice Zecchinelli, and cinematographer Claudio Cofrancesco, who just happens to be married to the director and the veteran of over 150 films, and whose handheld imagery lends the action an affecting intimacy and immediacy. Spampinato also wrote and edited the film, which wisely doesn't delve too deeply into the themes raised, as an adolescent boy wouldn't overthink them, even while trying to make sense of them. The odd scene comes right out of the rite-of-passage playbook, but Spampinato roots everything so convincingly in an atmosphere she knows well that it's impossible to resist the odd contrivance, let along begrudge it. Moreover, she eschews condescension and sentimentality in showing how Nico finds a way to mend his broken heart, while also gaining an invaluable insight into the mysteries of the grown-up world.

LONDON'S LAST WILDERNESS.

Shortly after Dorothy Leiper made The Living Thames (2018), Pablo Behrens started work on his own documentary about the estuary that has long fascinated writers and film-makers (it also features in Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair's London Orbital, 2002). Running just 60 minutes, London's Last Wilderness, could easily have been another eco-lament for lost places, spaces, and species. But, even though it's a little self-indulgent at times, this is a celebration of a distinctive area of wetland that refuses to be dictated to by those who dwell on its banks.

Opening captions suggest an extra-terrestrial has returned to Earth to follow up on a previous mission. Towering drone shots of the Thames Estuary, with its tributaries jagging through the mudflats, are accompanied by intercom chatter giving co-ordinates and opining about the nature of the place and its dependent eco-system. A flock of birds rise above the water in a mass take-off that fills the air with the sound of flapping wings.

A pause to gaze at a full moon is followed by the descent of a white mist that obscures everything until a pale sun comes up. A magic hour montage of red-streaked skies and glowing orbs follows before the visitor ventures out to sea to watch vessels gliding through the waves and to pick out the shapes that the water has carved into the estuary floor. Captions flash up data that disappears before its import can be digested, while the crackling map references begin to grate because the spaceman conceit feels so distractingly bogus, especially when he relates that the most powerful forces in the universe come together in such places to exert total control.

The photography remains exceptional, however, so it's still possible to marvel at the views of locales like Stangate Peak on the Medway. Off Whitstable, we see a clutch of stilted Second World War Maunsell forts, which prompt the visitor to claim, `Several structures made it clear to me that this region had sustained a prolonged war.' Glimpses are also seen of a Martello Tower from the Napoleonic era, but they are flown over without comment, along with other more elaborate installations that have long since been abandoned to the elements.

He is even more shaken by the exposed coffins and bones visible on Deadman's Island, the last resting place of prisoners from the Thames prison hulks that had operated from the 18th century. Claiming difficulty in differentiating between the real and the imagined, the spectator deduces that the remains must have come for a war of the worlds of such magnitude that it would almost certainly have compromised the survival of the species.

Flying on to Paglesham Reach on the River Roach, the aeronaut spots lots of wrecks in the muddy water. Coming further inland, he spies pleasure craft at anchor and is warned by mission control against approaching the humans enjoying the beach and funfair at Canvey Island. The next set of views chart a region where `the sea moves silently in no ordinary meeting of land and water but in full contact with the Universe'. Apparently.

A drop in at Leigh Creek, with its moored boats and crying gulls, prompts the observations, `A land that swallows the sea' and `a portal forgotten by time' before the traveller notes that it's possible to be taken by a place before knowing anything about it. Aerial shots reveal a remarkable topography pocked with abrupt indentations, sinuous detours, and dried clumps, as birds fly undisturbed and a lone boat bobs in the channel.

Having emerged from a dense fog at The Swale, the voyager reports to base that something dreadful is going to happen unless humans react to the readings he has taken from the sea. A rough tide crashes in and concerns are raised about whether sea walls would be able to withstand high water in what are called the seas of `human failures'. A poster for Sheerness (promising `you'll have a blast') is juxtaposed with data about the SS Richard Montgomery, a US Liberty ship that sank in 1944 and is known as `The Doomsday Wreck' because it contains 1400 tonnes of unexploded munitions. Other risks are noted around Tankerton and the Isle of Grain, as we see container ships and storage tanks en route to what the alien calls, `The Citadel'.

This, of course, is London and its towers jut into the sky with an arrogance that had been absence from the tour thus far. In drab, grey light, it looks what it is. Beating a hasty retreat, the visitor declares that it's impossible to cross the sea simply by staring at the water. He takes a last voyage, in order to discover `secrets too ancient to be spoken'. Buffeted by a storm, he claims to have `got the message', as the film ends with a recommendation to see strange lands with new eyes.

`They all have a lot of thinking to do,' the traveller insists during his brief sojourn in the capital. He's not wrong and Pablo Behrens borrows quotations from Joseph Conrad, H.G. Wells, Rabindranath Tagore, and Marcel Proust in order to underscore his own points. The textual blend doesn't always come off, unfortunately, with some of the pronouncements sounding like Iain Sinclair had hooked up with Yoko Ono at her most fanciful rather than Rachel Lichtenstein. The whole spaceman came travelling conceit feels specious and the imagery would be no less impressive without it. Behrens deserves credit for the photography and the sound design he created with Brendan Feeney, while Bartosz Szpak's score adeptly combines ethereality and urgency to complement the rhythms of Behrens and Alex Ochman's editing. Yet, while it's an ambitious bid to present problems and spark debate, this never packs a punch to match the likes of Jennifer Baichwal and Edward Burtynsky's Watermark (2013) or Jennifer Peedom's River (2021).