Wikipedia

Dead Calm (film)

Dead Calm is a 1989 Australian psychological thriller film directed by Phillip Noyce, produced by George Miller, and starring Sam Neill, Nicole Kidman and Billy Zane. The screenplay by Terry Hayes was based on the 1963 novel of the same name by Charles Williams.

Dead Calm
Theatrical release poster
Directed byPhillip Noyce
Screenplay byTerry Hayes
Based on
Dead Calm
1963 novel
by Charles Williams
Produced by
Starring
CinematographyDean Semler
Edited byRichard Francis-Bruce
Music byGraeme Revell
Production
company
Distributed byWarner Bros. (through Roadshow Distributors)
Release date
  • 7 April 1989 (1989-04-07)
Running time
95 minutes[1]
CountryAustralia
LanguageEnglish
BudgetA$10 million[2][3]
Box officeA$10.2 million[4][5]

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

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Rae Ingram is traumatized after a car crash results in the death of her young son. Her older husband, Royal Australian Navy officer Captain John Ingram, suggests a vacation 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 distressed man rows a dinghy over to the Saracen. He introduces himself as Hughie Warriner and tells them the schooner is sinking, the other passengers having died of food poisoning ten days prior.

While Hughie sleeps, a suspicious John rows out to the schooner, the Orpheus. Inside, he is horrified to discover the mutilated corpses of the other passengers and rushes back to the Saracen. However, Hughie awakens, knocks Rae unconscious, and sails off, leaving John behind.

Returning to the Orpheus, John manages to restart the engine and begin pursuing the Saracen. He also discovers video footage showing Hughie's increasingly unhinged behavior toward his fellow passengers. Rae awakens, and after a tense confrontation starts to endear herself to Hughie. John reaches Rae on the radio, but water damage makes him unable to reply except through clicks on the receiver to signal yes or no to her questions. John tells her the Orpheus is too far gone and will sink within hours, before his radio dies completely.

To save John, Rae plays along with Hughie's overtures, which gradually turn sexual. As they start to kiss and undress, Rae stalls by excusing herself to the bathroom. She runs on deck to assemble the yacht's shotgun, but her dog Ben follows and starts barking, causing Hughie to investigate. In a panic, Rae leaves the gun behind and returns to the bedroom, where she reluctantly has sex with Hughie.

Afterward, Rae spikes some lemonade 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 fight as a heavy storm begins rocking the yacht. Hughie wrestles the shotgun away, but the sedative disorients him and he shoots the Saracen's radio. Finding a harpoon launcher, Rae locks herself in the bedroom and fires through the door when Hughie starts to break in, accidentally killing Ben. Hughie begins to strangle her before the sedatives cause him to pass out. Rae ties him up and begins sailing back toward John. Hughie regains consciousness, cuts himself loose and comes after Rae, who shoots him in the shoulder with a harpoon and knocks him out again. She sets him adrift in the yacht's life raft.

Further damage from the storm causes the Orpheus to flood and a collapsed mast traps John below deck. He breaks free by kicking through the hull and sets the wreckage on fire. At dusk, Rae catches sight of the flames and finds John on a piece of floating debris, pulling him back onto the Saracen. The next morning they come upon the life raft, which is empty; Rae destroys it with a flare.

Some time later, while John is below decks preparing breakfast, a gravely injured Hughie appears and attacks Rae. John shoots Hughie in the mouth with a flare, killing him.

Cast

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Unfinished previous adaptation

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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

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Producer Tony Bill had tried to buy the rights from Welles but was never successful. He mentioned this to Philip 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

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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. Pictures 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

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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

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Box office

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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

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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,[20] derived from editor Peter M. Nichols' The New York Times Guide to the Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made.[6] The film was partly the inspiration for 1993 Hindi-language film Darr.[21]

Awards and nominations

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See also

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References

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  1. ↑ AustralianClassification. "View Title". Classification.gov.au. Archived from the original on 21 August 2016. Retrieved 27 July 2016.
  2. ↑ NEXT YEAR'S 10 BEST FILMS By Garry Maddox 13 July 1987 Sydney Morning Herald p 16
  3. ↑ Bright, Greg (28 May 1986). "Filmmakers $150m chase". The Sydney Morning Herald. p. 27.
  4. 1 2 "Dead Calm," Box Office Mojo. Retrieved 10 November 2011.
  5. 1 2 "Film Victoria - Australian Films at the Australian Box Office" (PDF). Film.vic.gov.au. Archived from the original (PDF) on 18 February 2011. Retrieved 27 July 2016.
  6. 1 2 Nichols, Peter M.; Scott, A. O. (2004). The New York Times Guide to the Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made. St. Martin's Griffin. p. 237. ISBN 978-0312326111 – via Internet Archive.
  7. ↑ October 2013, Simon Kinnear 14 (14 October 2013). "50 Amazing Unmade Movies". gamesradar. Retrieved 27 March 2020.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  8. 1 2 David Stratton, The Avocado Plantation: Boom and Bust in the Australian Film Industry, Pan MacMillan, 1990 p263–265
  9. ↑ Brian McFarlane, "Phil Noyce: Dead Calm", Cinema Papers, May 1989 p6–11
  10. ↑ Guthrie, Luna (25 August 2023). "This Star-Studded Thriller Began as an Orson Welles Passion Project". Collider. Retrieved 14 January 2024.
  11. ↑ Porcel, María (16 October 2023). "'Jurassic Park' actor Sam Neill says he's 'prepared to die from his cancer, but the thought of retiring fills me with horror'". EL PAÍS English. Retrieved 8 August 2024.
  12. ↑ "Dead Calm". Rotten Tomatoes. Archived from the original on 7 December 2008. Retrieved 12 February 2024..
  13. ↑ "Dead Calm". Metacritic. CBS Interactive. Retrieved 2 April 2022.
  14. ↑ "Home". CinemaScore. Retrieved 3 April 2022.
  15. ↑ Stratton, David (5 April 1989). "Film reviews: Dead Calm". Variety.
  16. ↑ "Dead Calm movie review & film summary (1989) | Roger Ebert". www.rogerebert.com. Retrieved 29 January 2026.
  17. 1 2 3 "'Dead Calm'". www.washingtonpost.com. Retrieved 29 January 2026.
  18. 1 2 "Movie Review - Dead Calm - Reviews/Film; A Psychological Drama Of Nightmares and Death - NYTimes.com". movies.nytimes.com. Archived from the original on 8 November 2011. Retrieved 29 January 2026.
  19. ↑ "'Dead Calm'". www.washingtonpost.com. Retrieved 29 January 2026.
  20. ↑ Schroeder, Wallace; Scott, A. O.; Dargis, Manohla (2019). The New York Times Book of Movies: The Essential 1,000 Films to See. Universe Publishing. p. 249. ISBN 978-0789336576 – via Internet Archive.
  21. ↑ "Yash Chopra in conversation with Uday Chopra - Darr". Archived from the original on 22 December 2021. Retrieved 26 October 2015 – via YouTube.
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