Adrift

Based on a real-life sto­ry from 1983, Adrift opens in medias res, in the mid­dle of the ocean, and in the mid­dle of a night­mare. After blur­ry, bare­ly vis­i­ble images of a ship’s detri­tus and a human fig­ure sink­ing through dark waters, 23-year-old Tami Old­ham (Shai­lene Wood­ley) awak­ens, bloody and con­fused, belowdecks in a flood­ing yacht that has sus­tained con­sid­er­able dam­age. ​“Richard!” she cries – the film’s first word – as she search­es des­per­ate­ly for her fel­low trav­el­er and lover.

From here on in, Bal­tasar Kormákur’s film unfurls in Tami’s con­fined head­space, show­ing in par­al­lel her des­per­ate attempts to get the strick­en ves­sel more or less ship­shape so that she can sail her­self and the severe­ly injured Richard (Sam Claflin) thou­sands of miles to Hawaii before they both die, and her mem­o­ries of first meet­ing Richard, falling in love and join­ing him in some sea­far­ing escapism.

In oth­er words, Adrift is all at once a high-stakes yarn of water­borne sur­vival (akin to JC Chandor’s All is Lost, Ang Lee’s Life of Pi and Kormákur’s own The Deep) and a free-spir­it­ed romance of the open seas. Between these poles, the divides of gen­der blur. In hap­pi­er times, before the hur­ri­cane dev­as­tates their lives, Richard describes Tami as ​“fear­less like a bloke”, to which she responds that he is ​“sen­si­tive like a woman”.

And if Tami, impressed with Richard’s man­ly solo glo­be­trot­ting, can­not wait to get on board as first mate in his adven­tures, soon, as he lies help­less on the deck, she will have to take the captain’s helm her­self and to expe­ri­ence at first hand the sun­burn, sea­sick­ness, star­va­tion and hal­lu­ci­na­tions of which he had half-jok­ing­ly boasted.

This gen­der rever­sal is fore­ground­ed in a scene where Richard reveals that he has inter­nalised the voice of his moth­er, who died when he was a child, and often speaks with her in his mind – a rev­e­la­tion that serves to fem­i­nise and plu­ralise this rugged­ly indi­vid­u­al­is­tic male traveller.

The switch­ing to and fro between the swim­ming romance of the past and the dawn­ing des­per­a­tion of the present brings with it a flu­id dynam­ic that ensures this nar­ra­tive of endurance is nev­er dif­fi­cult for the view­er to endure, while also drip-feed­ing infor­ma­tion about the cou­ple and their indi­vid­ual his­to­ries in just the right order to keep us both engaged and dis­tract­ed. It is spec­tac­u­lar­ly shot by DoP Robert Richard­son, vary­ing from intense close-ups on Tami to iso­lat­ing, often god’s‑eye-view wide shots of the (s)ailing boat, with heav­ing, rolling cam­er­a­work dur­ing the big storm itself.

From the very out­set we know that Tami is in seri­ous trou­ble – but as the film slow­ly, stealth­ily reveals the true depths of that trou­ble, and the extra­or­di­nary way in which Tami is man­ag­ing to stay on top, the film takes the dis­ap­point­ing mis­step of under­es­ti­mat­ing its audi­ence and over-explain­ing the mechan­ics of its plot­ting. This view­er would have pre­ferred to have been left a lit­tle more at sea.