Lovers in a dangerous tide
Couple battles nature in a tale that darts between present, past
There’s been plenty of movies about man (it’s almost always a man) facing the dangers of the boundless deep.
So the makers of Adrift had a bit of a challenge going in: how to make a film that feels saltwater fresh despite the canon of movies that have come before.
Icelandic director Baltasar Kormakur offers an interesting twist that actually works, although divulging it would amount to a major spoiler. So file and forget going in and you’ll be glad you did.
It helps immeasurably in immersing oneself in the story to know it’s based on actual events. In 1983, Richard Sharp, a Brit with his own vessel and oceans of experience, agrees to an elderly couple’s urgent request to sail their yacht from Tahiti to San Diego, Calif. His shipmate and new lady love, Tami Oldham, agrees to go along, albeit a tad reluctantly. She hails from San Diego and is far from ready to return home and end her own seafaring adventures.
The story opens with Tami awakening to a nightmare, a heavily damaged ship on a roiling ocean, some physical injuries and a beau nowhere to be found. Improbably, it seems, she spots Richard clinging to a foundering dinghy nearby and manages to get him back aboard where she discovers his injuries are far greater than her own.
Kormakur switches the narrative back and forth between present and past, when the couple first meet, to Oldham’s valiant struggles to stay afloat, rig a sail and forage enough food and clean water to survive a perilous journey to the nearest plausible landfall, Hawaii.
The story centres on the relationship between these two characters, and Kormakur has done a fine job of casting two very capable actors to fill the roles. Shailene Woodley plays Tami with a husky-voiced charm, demonstrating grit and ingenuity at every turn. Sam Claflin is similarly affecting as the more mature Richard, and the romance that blossoms between them is serendipitously believable. (The movie would sink otherwise.)
Robert Richardson’s fine cinematography turns the ocean into an implacable, immutable adversary, and Volker Bertelmann’s original score enhances a mood of dread against daunting odds. Kormakur builds an air of necessary tension throughout as each small triumph meets a setback.
The result is a film that will draw you into an absorbing tale of two lovers forced to test their mettle to the limit in a highstakes, high-seas adventure.