2026 • United Kingdom
Mark Jenkin’s Rose of Nevada (2026) is a Cornish ghost story without a ghost, a time-slip film without a machine, and a folk horror film that forced FolknHell to fiddle with its own definition of folk horror halfway through the discussion. A fishing boat disappears, reappears decades later and takes a new crew out to sea. When they return, the village is the same place and absolutely not the same place.
That is only the start of it. Andy Davidson, David Hall and Dave Houghton dig into a film where identity, memory, community and time seem to have been left out in the Cornish weather. There is plenty of admiration for Mark Jenkin’s handmade filmmaking, plenty of argument over what exactly has happened, and an unexpectedly serious investigation into the symbolic importance of some very dead fish.
The Rose of Nevada is a fishing boat that vanished from a Cornish village decades earlier. When it mysteriously reappears, a new crew takes it back out to sea in the hope of reviving both the boat and the fortunes attached to it.
Among those aboard are Liam and Nick, two men carrying very different relationships to the village and to their own lives. After the fishing trip, the crew return with a hold full of fish but find themselves roughly thirty years in the past.
The village appears familiar, but their personal histories have shifted. Liam, who left without a settled family life, suddenly finds himself with a wife and child. Nick experiences the reverse, returning to a version of the village in which the family he knew no longer exists.
Rather than explaining the mechanics, Jenkin lets the time slip work like a tear in memory. The characters are forced to inhabit altered lives while the boat, the sea and the fishing community continue as though they have seen stranger things.
Yes, and the interesting part is that Rose of Nevada helped FolknHell work out why.
At first glance, the film is an awkward fit for the podcast’s older criteria. There is no obvious ancient cult, no pagan ritual, no monster under the soil and no inherited supernatural custom being imposed on an outsider. Andy later describes the group as having come away convinced it was folk horror even though it did not neatly fit the rules they had been using.
During the episode, the hosts refine those rules into something more useful: a distinct place, a belief system and a stranger entering or disrupting that space.
On those terms, Rose of Nevada fits beautifully.
The Cornish fishing village is not merely a location. Its decline, history and relationship with the sea shape everything that happens. The community holds onto ideas of return, restoration and continuity, particularly around the missing boat. Liam and Nick become outsiders not because they arrive from another country or city, but because time itself makes them strangers inside lives that appear to belong to them.
The horror is therefore existential rather than monstrous. The past is not dead. It is sitting in the pub, expecting you home for tea.
FolknHell’s verdict is firm: Rose of Nevada is folk horror, but it is the sort that expands the genre rather than politely ticking its established boxes.
Time as a haunting The time slip is less interested in science-fiction mechanics than in emotional dislocation. Liam and Nick do not simply visit another year. They are confronted with lives that have been rearranged around them. Time behaves like a haunting, making familiar people and places suddenly uncanny.
Cornwall as more than scenery The village, harbour and sea are fundamental to the film’s folk horror identity. The episode connects the decaying fishing community to real economic and social change in Cornwall, including the disappearance of traditional industries and the transformation of coastal towns. The landscape feels beautiful, battered and slightly abandoned by the future.
Identity can be reassigned Liam gains a family. Nick loses one. The film’s most unsettling idea may be that identity is less stable than we assume. A different version of the same place can assign you an entirely different role, and everybody else may accept it before you do.
Mogi and the persistence of tradition Mogi barely seems troubled by the temporal chaos surrounding everyone else. His relationship is with the boat, the sea and the work. The hosts read him almost as the spirit of the Rose of Nevada itself, a figure of continuity while other characters are pulled apart by changing lives.
The film where everything and nothing happens Dave Houghton and David Hall circle around one of the film’s central pleasures: on paper, relatively little occurs. Men go to sea. They fish. They return. Yet inside that simple framework sits a deeply complicated story about time, loss and altered identity. The restraint is part of the achievement.
Those dead fish The episode spends a glorious amount of time wondering why the supposedly fresh catch looks unmistakably deceased long before anyone would reasonably expect it to. Budgetary accident or deliberate clue? David argues the image is too prominent to be meaningless, while Andy agrees that Jenkin’s precision makes an accidental explanation difficult to accept. Like much of the film, the dead fish refuse to provide a tidy answer.
Rose of Nevada is not designed for viewers who need every event labelled, explained and filed before the credits roll. It moves slowly, withholds answers and trusts atmosphere, image and repetition to do work that another film might hand over to dialogue.
For FolknHell, that is very much a strength. Dave Houghton raises his opinion after a repeat viewing and scores it 9/10, while the wider scoring discussion places the film firmly in 9-to-10 territory. Andy is particularly enthusiastic, describing it elsewhere in the discussion around this period as a contender for his top slot.
The film also leaves a useful mark on the podcast itself. Rather than forcing Rose of Nevada through an old folk horror checklist, the hosts allow the film to expose where that checklist has become too narrow.
Is it folk horror? Yes. Not because there is a wicker mask hiding behind the harbour wall, but because place, memory, community and an inherited relationship with the sea have become powerful enough to rearrange reality.
Worth watching? Absolutely, especially if you like your folk horror windswept, ambiguous and in no hurry whatsoever to tell you what just happened.
And if you solve the dead fish, do let FolknHell know.
How each host rated this film