Venice film festival
A vanished trawler returns in Mark Jenkin’s time-slipping film, an enigmatic drama steeped in loss, memory and the unsettling rhythms of coastal life
T
hose in peril at sea are the subject of this arresting ghost story from Cornish film-maker Mark Jenkin. Set in a fishing village, it explores the intimate presence of death and the disquieting claustrophobia of family and community – qualities often assumed to be eternal virtues.
Maybe a film of just this kind was always what Jenkin’s distinct film language was waiting for. His technique and his quasi-primitivist aesthetic favour the eerie and the uncanny; his films have the texture of early cinema updated to the present day, shot on 16mm, developed by hand in such a way as to create scratches on the print, with dialogue and ambient sound overdubbed. It all creates a drama that feels like a remembered dream, and when there are actual dream sequences the gap between the illusion and reality is very slight. The movie itself feels to me like a kind of found object, and in this digital age it is vanishingly rare to encounter something that makes you think of the lost physical reality of celluloid whirring through a projector’s old-fashioned metal sprockets.
