Filmed around the Great Barrier Reef, the plot focuses on a married couple, who, after tragically losing their son, are spending some time isolated at sea, when they come across a stranger who has abandoned a sinking ship.
Notably, the movie is the first successful film adaptation of the novel, after Orson Welles worked for a number of years to complete his own film based on it titled The Deep, though it ultimately went unreleased and uncompleted.
Dead Calm was generally well received, with critics praising Neill, Kidman, and Zane's performances and the oceanic cinematography. It was nominated in eight categories at the 1989 Australian Film Institute Awards, including Best Film, and won four. Modern retrospective analyses have been favorable, with The New York Times naming it one of the 1000 best films ever made.[6]
Plot
Rae Ingram is involved in a car crash which results in the death of her young son. Her older husband, Royal Australian Navy officer Captain John Ingram, suggests that they head out for a vacation alone on their yacht, the Saracen. In the middle of the Pacific Ocean, they encounter a drifting schooner that seems to be taking on water. A man rows a dinghy over to the Saracen for help. He introduces himself as Hughie Warriner and tells them the schooner is sinking and that the other passengers have all died of food poisoning.
John rows to the schooner, the Orpheus. Inside, John discovers the mutilated corpses of the other passengers and video footage indicating that Hughie may have murdered them. On the Saracen, Hughie awakens, knocks out Rae, and sails it away.
Left behind, John attempts to keep the Orpheus from sinking and catch up with the Saracen. Rae awakens, and John reaches her on the radio, but water damage makes him unable to reply except through clicks on the radio receiver to signal yes or no to her questions. Hughie tries to convince Rae to be friends with him. Rae accepts, attempting to earn his trust. John tells her that the Orpheus is too far gone and will sink within hours.
To save John, Rae plays along with Hughie's overtures long enough to get to the shotgun on the deck. She and Hughie start to kiss and undress, before Rae stalls for time by saying that she has to go to the bathroom. She runs onto the deck to assemble the shotgun, but her dog Ben follows her and starts barking, causing Hughie to investigate. In a panic, Rae leaves the gun behind. She returns to the bedroom, where Hughie coerces her into sex.
Afterward, Rae fixes some lemonade spiked with a heavy dose of her prescription sedatives and tricks Hughie into drinking it. Claiming she is going to get dressed, Rae returns for the shotgun, but Hughie discovers her and they grapple for the gun as a storm approaches. Hughie gains control of the shotgun, but the effects of the sedative cause him to aim poorly and shoot out the Saracen's radio. Rae finds a harpoon launcher and locks herself in the bedroom. Hughie starts forcing the bedroom door and Rae fires harpoons through it, but hits and kills Ben, who was on the other side. Hughie bursts out of hiding to strangle her, but passes out from the drugs. Rae ties him up and sails back to rescue John. Hughie regains consciousness, cuts himself loose and comes after Rae, who shoots him in the shoulder with a harpoon and knocks him unconscious again. She sets him adrift in the yacht's life raft.
The damage and the storm have caused the Orpheus to fill almost completely with water, leaving John locked in the hold and struggling to breathe through a pipe. He finally breaks free after kicking through the hull and sets the wrecked Orpheus on fire so Rae can find his location. At dusk, Rae notices the flames and eventually finds John on a piece of floating debris. She pulls him back on board the Saracen, and they come upon the floating life raft, which Rae incinerates with a flare.
The next day, John washes Rae's hair and prepares breakfast for her. While he is below decks, a gravely injured Hughie appears and begins to strangle her. While Rae struggles against him, John shoots Hughie in the mouth with a flare, killing him. Rae and John embrace as they sail away, leaving Hughie's body behind.
The film is based on the novel Dead Calm by American author Charles Williams. Orson Welles had optioned the film rights in the mid-1960's. Under the title The Deep, Welles shot the film between 1966 and 1969 off the coast of Yugoslavia. The prospective film starred Laurence Harvey as Hughie, Michael Bryant as Ingram, Oja Kodar as Rae, and Welles himself played Russ Bellowes. Jeanne Moreau played Hughie's wife Ruth, a character present in the original novel but cut out of Noyce's film.
Welles' production was plagued by financial and technical problems, and effectively halted at the end of 1969. Principal photography remained incomplete, and Laurence Harvey's death in 1973 effectively ended any hope of completing the film.[7] The original film negative is considered lost, though two workprints survive, and footage from the film has been displayed since.
Production
Producer Tony Bill had tried to buy the rights from Welles but was never successful. He mentioned this to Phil Noyce, giving him a copy of the book in 1984. Noyce enjoyed the book and showed it to George Miller and Terry Hayes, who were enthusiastic. Miller managed to persuade Oja Kodar, Welles's companion, who controlled the rights to the novel, to sell the book to Kennedy Miller.[8][9]
The book features several other main characters (including Hughie's wife and survivors John finds on the Orpheus), and presented Hughie as a nominally asexual manchild.[10] It also goes into further detail about what caused Hughie's psychotic break.
Filming
The film was shot over a 6-month span in Queensland's Whitsunday Islands beginning in May 1987. George Miller directed some sequences himself, including one where Sam Neill's character is tormented in the boat by a shark. This scene ended up being dropped from the final film.
The sequence in which John kills Hughie with a flare was filmed at the request of Warner Bros seven months after principal photography finished. As written, the film originally ended with Rae setting Hughie adrift on a life raft to ostensibly die at sea; the studio was unhappy with this ambiguity and wanted a definite fate for the film's antagonist.[8]
Sam Neill met his future wife Noriko Watanabe during filming.[11]
Music
The synthesizer-driven film score was composed and performed by New Zealand musician Graeme Revell, of the industrial group SPK. Dead Calm was Revell's first ever film score, and earned him an AFI Award for Best Original Music Score.
Reception
Box office
Dead Calm grossed $2,444,407 at the box office in Australia,[5] which is equivalent to $4,253,268 in 2009 dollars. It grossed $7,825,009 in the U.S.[4]
Critical reception
Dead Calm has an 84% "fresh" rating at Rotten Tomatoes based on 31 reviews, with a rating of 7.5/10. The site's consensus states that "Nicole Kidman's coiled intensity and muscular direction by Phillip Noyce give this nautical thriller a disquieting sense of dread".[12] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 70 out of 100, based on 16 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[13] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale.[14]
According to David Stratton of Variety, "throughout the film, Nicole Kidman is excellent" and "she gives the character of Rae real tenacity and energy" and "though not always entirely credible" the picture "is a nail-biting suspense pic, handsomely produced and inventively directed."[15]Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote that the film "generates genuine tension."[16]Desson Howe of The Washington Post praised the film's creators: "Noyce's direction moves impressively from sensual tenderness (between husband and wife) to edge-of-the-seat horror. With accomplished editing by Richard Francis-Bruce and scoring by Graeme Revell, he finds lurking dangers in quiet, peaceful waters."[17]
On the other hand, Caryn James of The New York Times felt that the film was "an unsettling hybrid of escapist suspense and the kind of pure trash that depends on dead babies and murdered dogs for effect," and that Dead Calm "becomes disturbing for all the wrong reasons."[18] A number of critics faulted the film's ending as being over-the-top, with the Post's Howe writing, "... while it's afloat, 'Dead Calm' is a majestic horror cruise. ... For much of the movie, you're enthralled. By the end, you're laughing."[17]
The acting was generally considered excellent, with Zane being cited for injecting "unforgettable humanity and evil puckishness into his role"[17] and being "suitably manic and evil." And while Rita Kempley of The Washington Post wrote "what's most fascinating about it is Rae's place in the pantheon of heroines, an Amazon for the '90s,"[19] the Times' James called Kidman's character "tough but stupid."[18]
The film is listed on The New York Times Top 1000 Movies list,[6] derived from editor Peter M. Nichols' The New York Times Guide to the Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made (St. Martin's Griffin, 2004). The film was partly the inspiration for 1993 Hindi-language film Darr.[20]
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