WET & WILD
Adrift a true tale of survival at sea featuring female forces Woodley and Mother Nature
ADRIFT ★★★★ out of 5 Cast: Shailene Woodley, Sam Claflin Director: Baltasar Kormákur Duration: 2h
Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur has a thing for extreme survival tales. His 2012 film The Deep told of a fisherman fighting to survive in frigid water after a capsizing. 2015’s Everest chronicled the 1996 climbing season on the world’s highest mountain. And he remade his own 2008 Icelandic-language thriller Reykjavik-Rotterdam in 2012 as Contraband, starring Mark Wahlberg, whose presence automatically makes everything 37 per cent more dangerous.
His newest, Adrift, is based on a true story, although the less you know about it going in the better. It opens with Tami Oldham (Shailene Woodley) regaining consciousness in the waterlogged interior of a small yacht at sea; clearly, something very bad has just transpired.
Before we learn too much more, the scene cuts to “five months earlier.” Tami is working as a dockhand in a Fiji harbour when she meets Richard Sharp (Sam Claflin), an easygoing sailor to whom she takes an immediate shine.
The decision to cut between the dryland meet-cute and the post-storm survival tale seemed a drama-draining idea at first. Remember Robert Redford in All is Lost, where we never left his stricken vessel through the entire film?
But it’s expertly timed; the story ebbs back to what brought Tami and Richard together, then flows forward to show them fighting to survive, after she spots him bobbing on a piece of flotsam and hauls him back aboard.
And while a less confident storyteller would throw all manner of obstacles in their path — sharks, more rough weather, two-headed sharks, giant sharks, etc. — Kormákur presents us with the quieter, just-as-real perils of diminishing fresh water and food, coupled with the fact that the yacht has drifted too far from its last radioed position to expect a rescue. Not to mention Richard’s injuries, which include a cracked rib and a badly torn leg.
It falls to Tami to navigate them across 5,000 kms of open sea to Hawaii, with little more than her willpower and the ability to use a sextant. Kudos both to this scientific shoutout, and to the makeup department for creating a believably distressed look to both actors as their time at sea stretches into weeks.
Woodley also has a producing credit on Adrift. This might be why her naked dance in the rain manages to be at once the most beautiful, least sexualized nudity I’ve seen on screen this year.
She’s astounding in the role of the genial Californian wanderer who takes up with Claflin’s slightly more worldweary Brit. She’s been acting since she was less than 10, but most critics first took notice of her understated performance as George Clooney’s daughter in 2011’s The Descendants. Then, as her contemporary Jennifer Lawrence was making it big in The Hunger Games, she ably anchored the somewhat less successful Divergent series before moving to TV and Big Little Lies.
She’s in her element here, strong but not superhuman, realistically terrified and yet determined to survive. Claflin has less to do, but by the time the story plays out it’s more than apparent that neither of these characters would have gotten as far as they did without the other. Sometimes the most important survival gear (next to that sextant) is having someone with whom to survive.