Sea survival drama makes a real splash
Adrift
12A cert, 96 min Dir Baltasar Kormákur Starring Shailene Woodley, Sam Claflin
The composer Hugo Friedhofer used to tell a story about working on Alfred Hitchcock’s 1944 shipwreck thriller
Lifeboat. The director had insisted it would feature no musical score other than over the credits, so, feeling surplus to requirements, Friedhofer and his colleague David Raksin asked Hitchcock to reconsider.
“How come no music?” Raksin asked. “Out in the middle of the ocean, where’s the orchestra?” harrumphed Hitchcock. “Out in the middle of the ocean, where’s the camera?” Raksin replied.
In other words, there will always be a splash of poetic licence in films such as Lifeboat – and indeed Adrift. And the latter, a new true-life survival drama adapted from Tami Oldham’s memoirs, gets the balance just about right. While sailing from Tahiti to San Diego in 1983, Oldham and her then-fiancé, Richard Sharp, were swallowed up by a yacht-splintering tempest, and Baltasar Kormákur’s film artfully marries an absorbing account of their fight to stay alive with the love story that makes it worth a damn.
It begins in the hurricane’s immediate aftermath, 1,400 miles from land, with Tami (Shailene Woodley) coming around in the flooded cabin of their vessel, the Hazana. We then flash back five months to her first encounter with Richard (Sam Claflin) in Tahiti. Then it’s back to the crisis, then back to the romance, and so on until the timelines catch up. Initially, the tandem plotting smacks of gimmickry – like a Nicholas Sparks take on All is Lost, the 2013 survival-at-sea drama with Robert Redford. But as things progress, the ingenuity of this structure snaps into focus. (The script is by Aaron and Jordan Kandell, who also worked on Disney’s seafaring Moana, and David Branson Smith.) The time-shuffling also allows Adrift to climax with the hurricane itself, which is realised with thunderous, inky-hued intensity.
Kormákur is the Icelander behind Jar City and Contraband, and whose most recent English-language project, Everest, was the strongest hint yet of an artistic inclination towards true tales of holidays gone catastrophic. That larger ensemble piece got away from him at times, but the more intimate scale of this film plays to his knack for pressure-cooker character studies.
As do his leads. Woodley, now rid of the Divergent series, has always struck me as a young Sigourney Weaver-type waiting for her Alien. This isn’t it, but she proves a natural action heroine, selling you on Tami’s capability under stress without ceding her vulnerability.
She also has a playful, convincing chemistry with Claflin, even if he spends much of the post-wreck strand laid up with a nasty leg wound.
He has more to do in the Tahiti section, though, including a fantastic sequence in which the pair take a hike inland and discover a natural plunge pool sparkling in a gorge below. Tami leaps into thin air and drops out of sight. Richard hesitates, then follows, the camera plummets with him, then gets its bearings in the water, as does he, before joining them in an embrace.
Plot-wise, it’s just a moment of calm before the… well, you know. But it neatly encapsulates why Adrift works as well as it does – a physical plunge entwined with an emotional one, in which the camera joins its cast in the leap.