Director – Phillip Noyce – 1989 – Australia – Cert. 15 – 96m
*****
A bereaved couple taking time off on their yacht answer a distress call from another boat and become embroiled in a game of cat and mouse – out in UK cinemas 1989
Royal Australian Naval Officer John Ingram (Sam Neill) arrives home in Oz to discover his beautiful wife Rae (Nicole Kidman) has been involved in a car accident which was fatal for their young child. She’s in the hospital in critical condition; the camera descends into her eye. She remembers with horror her child fatefully undoing his seat belt before being thrown through a windscreen.
Having thus traumatised the audience, this then jumps to the couple on their yacht, the Saracen, where they are getting away from it all for several weeks. The weather is as flat as the title suggests. Rae bathes in the sea like an initiate in some baptismal rite awaiting a fresh start – until another vessel turns up – the Orpheus, with its one survivor Hughie Warriner (Billy Zane) claiming the rest – including several nubile, “open-minded” young women on a “photographic assignment” – have died of botulism from tuna that Hughie didn’t eat because he hates the stuff. Locking a sleeping Hughie in below deck, John goes off to see if he can do anything to aid the Orpheus, which is apparently sinking. This leaves Rae alone to be terrorised by Hughie once he gets out – which he does, and promptly starts steering the boat away from the Orpheus…
You have to be pretty clever to make a plot like this work, but then the Kennedy Miller people are a clever outfit, and work it does, beautifully so. The original crime story by pulp writer Charles Williams was filmed by Orson Welles as The Deep but never released; Kennedy Miller stalwart writer Terry Hayes (Mad Max 2, George Miller, 1981; Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, George Miller, George Ogilvie, 1983) manages both to give sufficient depth to the characters (and throw in a dog for good measure) as well as keep the plot going by and large unpredictably.
Dean Semler (cinematographer on the same two films) makes seascape vistas as impressive as his previous desert ones. All three members of the cast are memorable, and one hopes to see a lot more of the two lesser known faces. Director Phillip Noyce holds the whole thing together with considerable skill, and if the Alien-style false ending is as silly as it is predictable the rest of the movie is so taut that audiences won’t find it hard to forgive him and his team for this little oversight.
Review originally published in TNT magazine, 1989.
Trailer: