by Chris Feil
Adrift opens with one of the more terrifying examples of recent one-take fakeout shots - the camera weaves in and out of the water overtaking the cabin of a yacht, as a bloodied Shailene Woodley comes to. Frantically, we follow her above deck to see the half-sunken ship is as irrevocably damaged as we feared. But the panic really comes as the camera dizzyingly reveals nothing but empty steady ocean surrounding her.
The film abruptly flashes back, alternating between her story leading up to crisis and her struggle for survival at sea. Woodley is Tami, a young world traveler avoiding a tumultuous family history at home in America. She meets a handsome and similarly dispositioned Richard, played by Sam Claflin, and their romance is fast and escapist. A lucrative job sailing an older couple’s yacht across the Pacific sets them on a course for disaster, one that leaves Richard incapacitated and Tami left with minimal sailing skills, no tools for communication, and a ship barely capable of more than a steady drag towards an imprecise destination.
It’s true story stuff and it feels like a paint-by-number version of it, and completed in only primary colors. Perhaps too briskly paced at just over 90 minutes, the film gives minimal character nuance and keeps its lovers speaking in platitudes. Director Baltasar Kormákur is no stranger to the disaster genre and does well with those aspects, but its a more human element that the film is sorely missing. The fatalistic dread of the elements is captured best in Robert Richardson’s swaying seasick lensing, often enveloping the stars in the unfeeling ocean and visually expressing their internal doom in ways the film is strangely disinterested.
Part of the blame could be attributed to the sluggish dual narratives at play. The back and forth structure positions the battle to survive the hurricane and the most dire stakes after weeks at sea against one another, never really allowing anything to connect as we get to know them or watch them suffer. It’s a scattered story without detail, constantly deflating its tension with a limply established love story (not helped when Claflin, as unengaging as ever, literally and figuratively just lays there).
The film’s penchant for those digitally Frankensteined single takes is just the beginning of its compulsive fakeouts - Adrift also relies on a final act narrative twist that makes the structure read as manipulative. It plays as a missed opportunity for more complex emotional textures, one that could have gifted the relationship onscreen with a more specific take. Woodley however works her ass off to sell this thing.
The internet has been rather mean to Shailene Woodley. And granted her projects of late have brought her more milquetoast qualities to the forefront, while her best work in films like The Spectacular Now and The Descendants mined her understated gifts to involving pathos. Adrift isn't exactly a return to those heights, but that's because the film isn't very interested in Tami's motivations beyond the surface. But the performance, in all its physical rigor and lack of showboating (listen, you get one pun to use on movies like this, it’s a rule), shows why the actress should be given more of a fair shake and projects of more depth. This movie would be fairly lost without her.
Grade: C-