Well, if I already wasn’t a fan of getting on a boat in the middle of the water, Adrift might have finally put the nail in that coffin. But despite my palpable fear and stress at being stranded at sea, there wasn’t much more that sunk into my bones. Adrift is a well enough movie. It’s acted well enough by Shailene Woodley and Sam Claflin, the pair making for a fun, but bland couple for us to lay our fears on. It’s directed well enough by Baltasar Kormákur, whose love for putting people in peril is a feat until itself. I enjoyed it well enough for what it was, but something kept me from loving it.
The key to enjoying Adrift is to figure out how much mileage that you get out of being emotionally manipulated. Movies essentially are cut to manipulate you, to tell you a story in a manufactured way. The story of this movie is Richard Sharp and Tami Oldham, a young couple who fell in love and decided to sail a boat from Tahiti to San Diego, only to have to survive for 41 days after being besieged by a hurricane. It’s a compelling survival tale, the ocean is massive and unforgiving, and there really is only one way for them not to die.
However, I found myself being taken out of the narrative by how it was constructed, particularly given its final act information. The harrowing plight of Tami and Richard is a tough sit, but it’s often undercut by returns to the past so we can see how they fell in love. It’s cute stuff but I was kind of hoping for more. But I could feel that the movie was trying to reach out and drag my spirit to and fro.
SPOILERS AHEAD
The movie was edited this way so that you don’t know that Tami has been hallucinating about Richard being alive the entire time. He actually died in that hurricane, revealed when Tami says she has to give him up at about day 36. It’s a moment that could have yielded a gut punch had the movie not been so keen to show us her doing a variety of things that he could only have been there for or used its conceit more vividly. We are never allowed to question whether he’s keeping her alive or her sanity is truly slipping, because the movie has to move back and forth between time periods.
It’s just something I couldn’t buy, particularly when it came time for our lass to give up the hallucinations and start living in her final moments. All of a sudden she was able to fish, when she had failed epically before and bemoaned having to cause suffering to a living thing (the movie’s dumbest line given the circumstances), and other things she couldn’t or wouldn’t have. I appreciated the use of motivation for her character but as constructed the movie feels more like a fake out, a moment that makes the movie ring false. Adrift becomes no longer a movie about survival in the midst of it all, but instead a movie about a twist and how the creatives can hide it.