In an age where anyone could become a Sean Baker by hitting “record” on their phone, Mark Jenkin has stayed ahead of the curve with old technology. On Bait, Jenkin’s 2019 debut feature, he used a wind-up Bolex camera from 1976, shooting everything on scratchy 16mm film. It was an instant cult success. At the BAFTAs, where Bait won an award in early 2020, Quentin Tarantino approached Jenkin with praise, calling him “the Bait guy”.

If Tarantino were to approach Jenkin today, it might be as “the Bolex guy”, such is the camera’s impact on Jenkin’s eerie, esoteric aesthetic. As the Bolex can’t handle shots lasting longer than 27 seconds, which is when the camera needs to be cranked by hand, Jenkin’s films (he’s shot two more since Bait) each possess a distinct visual grammar: instead of relying on lazy coverage, they’re packed with purposeful close-ups and inherent spontaneity. Moreover, Jenkin doesn’t record audio on set: the sound is entirely created in postproduction, resulting in a Lynchian disconnect. The most unsettling moment of Bait, though, might be a shot of a MacBook: a reminder that Jenkin is making movies in the present day.

“When I went out with Bait, I thought it was going to be queues of old people wanting to talk about the good, old days of shooting on film,” Jenkin tells me upstairs at Picturehouse Central. “But they weren’t there. It was young people with 35mm cameras. They’d come up to me afterwards and ask about Super 8 and 16mm.” In fact, in the lobby, I witness a wannabe filmmaker approach Jenkin for advice. “It’s always flattering when the younger generation, who are always going to be cooler than you, are interested in what you’re doing. Every day, we’re told cinema’s dead, but there’s a whole younger generation that gather on Letterboxd that studios and filmmakers can’t ignore anymore. That’s so exciting.”

It’s April and Jenkin is in the middle of a Q&A tour for his new film, Rose of Nevada, a hypnotic horror that’s also a time-travel melodrama. Last night he was in Liverpool, and I’ve caught him in London hours before he travels up to Manchester. The 50-year-old Cornish filmmaker is a firm believer in the cinematic experience (I’ve spotted him as an audience member for 35mm repertory screenings at BFI Southbank), with Rose of Nevada expected to draw in even more viewers: unlike Bait, Rose of Nevada is shot in colour and has bona fide movie stars in George MacKay and Callum Turner.

Combined with Jenkin’s playful, genre-savvy imagination, the Bolex-shot images of Rose of Nevada are poetic, immediate, and starkly haunting, especially when placed against the Netflix-ification of how most movies tend to look nowadays. In the ghostly mystery, Nick (MacKay) is a struggling family man seen early on at a foodbank, while Liam (Turner) has landed in Cornwall without a job or home. It’s clear this fishing village has seen better days, and that assertion is literalised with the spooky arrival of a boat once believed to be lost. Boarding the vessel, Nick and Liam head off on a fishing trip – even though “GET OFF THE BOAT NOW” is engraved in the wood – and return to the harbour, realising they’ve gone back 30 years in time.

“It’s not a film about fishing,” says Jenkin. “It’s also not about time-travel, because it’s not reliant on the time slip.” However, Jenkin, who’s the sole writer, director, cinematographer, editor, and composer, prefers to not elaborate on his intentions. The exception is his avowal that he’s not romanticising the past. “There’s no better time to be alive in terms of standard of living, life expectancy, tolerance, and the acceptance of difference,” he says. “Obviously, there’s still so far to go. Austerity did so much damage. I wanted to illustrate that without it being a political statement.”

“It’s fucking insane that we’re the sixth-biggest economy in the world, and people are relying on foodbanks. The film flags up that in some ways we’re going backwards” – Mark Jenkin

So when Nick and Liam head back to 1993, the local fishing industry is once again thriving, and the building that was formerly a food bank is now a bustling post office. “Food banks are good and serve a purpose,” says Jenkin. “But the normalisation of food banks is bad. It’s fucking insane that we’re the sixth-biggest economy in the world, and people are relying on food banks. The film flags up that in some ways we’re going backwards.”

Stranded in 1993, Nick is distraught by the distance from his 2023 family, whereas Liam gladly inserts himself into a new household and essentially steals a dead man’s life. The casting works: MacKay specialises in thoughtful, sensitive types (The Beast, The End); Turner, who might be the next James Bond, brings rock star energy to Liam. To my surprise, Jenkin originally asked MacKay to play Liam.

“When I [eventually] met Mark, we didn’t talk about the film once,” MacKay tells me over Zoom. “We talked about our lives. At the end of that, he said I’d be more right for Nick. And it felt right, because Nick behaves the way he does because he’s trying to do what’s best for his family. I haven’t had a role where that’s been at the character’s core before.”

Until recently, MacKay, who’s now 34, was known for boyish roles. Even 2024’s The End was about delayed adolescence. “In the last few years, I’ve got my own family,” says the English actor. “I’ve matured so much. I just know more. Being a father of two has taught me things about myself. The things I’m still concerned by are no longer that of those younger characters.”

MacKay, like Turner, was a fan of Bait and Enys Men, and as a firm believer that the process of filmmaking is as crucial as the final product, he was keen to be pushed by Jenkin’s idiosyncratic methods. As a Bolex-enforced rule, the actors only had one or two takes, although Jenkin explains that they had opposite approaches: MacKay would prepare beforehand and stick to his ideas, whereas Turner might decide upon something new and request a third attempt.

“Three-take Turner!” jokes MacKay. “You develop a real trust in Mark. If he’s happy with the first take, you move on. The sparsity of the writing allows for multiple interpretations to be projected onto it, rather than for you to offer a number of definitive interpretations of a line. I knew that a level of neutrality to the delivery would leave it more open to a number of interpretations.” However, MacKay notes, “The film begins with my character coming into a foodbank. It’s set in a world that’s real. That in itself is a political statement: that’s where things are in some places in the UK.”

“I’ve matured so much. I just know more. Being a father of two has taught me things about myself. The things I’m still concerned by are no longer that of those younger characters” – George MacKay

In terms of not explaining his films, Jenkin points to David Lynch’s similar refusal. It leads to a lengthy tangent about our mutual love (or terror) of Laura Palmer’s scream at the end of Twin Peaks: The Return. “Lynch realised you can unsettle an audience with sound in a way you can’t do with visuals,” says Jenkin. “A jump scare is over in a second, and you laugh at yourself. It’s almost impossible to create a visual that’s unsettling for a prolonged amount of time – because our brains make sense of it. But Lynch might have 30 tracks of audio that are naturalistic, and one’s playing backwards. If you don’t know why something’s not right, it’s unsettling.”

Jenkin describes an example in Enys Men where the cottage’s ticking clocks are always too quick or too slow. He also recalls a version of Rose of Nevada that was practically finished except for Turner’s dialogue, which was temporary voiced by the director himself. “Callum came in one day, did his dialogue, we dropped it in, and it changed the entire film. It changed George’s performance. [People thought] we recut it. I was like: ‘No, all we did was replace my voice with Callum’s.’ How the fuck does that happen? It’s supernatural. But that’s what cinema does. It’s the greatest art form we’ve ever invented, because it’s so keyed into how our minds and subconscious work. But it’s so sophisticated, I don’t understand how it works.”

Jenkin acknowledges the personal tragedy of Lynch’s passing, and that a fourth series of Twin Peaks will never materialise. “But now Twin Peaks will play forever because he didn’t explain it. He leaves us to work it out. That’s what I want to do with my films. A film falls to pieces if you explain the meaning. You kill it. If you don’t understand a film in the moment, it carries on once you leave the cinema.”

Rose of Nevada is released in cinemas on 24 April, and on BFI Blu-ray and BFI Player this summer