Adrift

I do like a good survival thriller. There's something very primal about watching a person fighting for their life against the forces of mother nature. It makes you realise just how insignificant and puny people really are. A true life survival tale is good too though the tension is nearly always tempered by the fact that you know the person has to survive at the end otherwise how would we know what happened. Adrift is one such true life tale and you'll get far more out of it if you go into knowing as little as possible about the real situation.

Tami Oldham was a young woman from San Diego without an anchor to the world. She'd been travelling aimlessly around the world since the age of 18 and in 1983 she eventually found herself in Tahiti. Here she met sailor Richard Sharp and the two fell in love. Neither had any intention of returning home until an offer to sail a boat across the Pacific to California gave them the opportunity to travel together and make some solid cash. Then Hurricane Raymond struck.

I liked this. It's nothing we haven't seen before but what's done is done well. Two excellent performances from Shailene Woodley and Sam Claflin suck us into the story and the chemistry between them really makes you want to see them make the end credits. Making an audience care about film characters is a tough thing to do and any film that can do that has won half the battle already. It's especially important here because these two characters are onscreen alone for the vast majority of the film. Woodley is a super actress. She has a lovely expressive smile that inspires empathy straight away. Scenes of her struggling at sea will have you struggling to catch your breath and willing her on. It's her film and she carries it with ease. Claflin's Richard is sidelined throughout and Woodley is called on to put in a very physical performance and does it convincingly.

It's a frustratingly told story though. Cutting back and forth between the couple's first meeting and burgeoning relationship and then 5 months ahead to the aftermath of the Hurricane. Just when you are settling in with one timeline it cuts back to the other and this cutting increases in frequency as we near the end of the film. I wished they'd actually left the hurricane scenes to our imagination because as convincingly as it's portrayed, it keeps getting in the way of a more interesting story of survival. There's something about the thought of floating and trying to survive in the middle of a calm ocean with all the darkness beneath that is just terrifying. Far scarier than any storm.

Director Baltasar Kormákur is a dab hand at the aul survival flicks after this and Everest. He has a good eye too and in places this is a beautiful looking film and a fine advertisement for the Pacific Islands. Sunset's the colour of "beet dyed pomegranete" and "sizzling salmon ketchup", deserted atolls and craggy river ravines will give the most settled of us a serious case of wanderlust. That is until we remember what the film is about and realise that we are probably better off living vicariously in the cinema.

This is a grand way to spend an hour and a half. It's a pity about the annoying structure of the film but a very committed and fiercely likable performance from Shailene Woodley makes it worth your while.