Dead Calm (1989)
In the middle of nowhere there is nowhere to hide...
Ahoy there! Friday’s film recommendation is Phillip Noyce’s maritime thriller, Dead Calm (1989), based on Charles Williams’ psychological novel of 1963. Shot almost entirely at sea aboard a swanky yacht, super sailors Sam Neill and Nicole Kidman pit their nautical wits against deranged American Psycho, Billy Zane…
I like home invasion movies. I’m not entirely sure why this is. They’re almost voyeuristic. Which might, possibly, reveal something slightly worrying about my psychological make-up (remember that droll cartoon in The New Yorker? “Lassie! Get Help!”). Home invasion films usually go along similar lines: somethin’ real nasty arrives to disturb a nicely ordered and comforting set-up, and then, as observers viewing from on high — settled into a comfy armchair with a nice relaxing cocktail — we can spend an enjoyable two hours or so watching the victims cope with the situation. The clever ones survive. The thickos meet their maker. It’s a bit like studying white mice in a nuclear research laboratory. Or those amusing SAS television programmes, in which a squad of gormless recruits are forced to endure all sorts of ghastly endurance tests. There’s a vicarious pleasure. It’s all so marvellously detached.
Straw Dogs (1971), which we covered a year or so back, is a fabulous example of the home invasion genre, as is the excellent Knock Knock (2015), in which, over the course of a weekend, a pair of twenty-something sexpots worm their way into an earnest architect’s trendy modernist pad, whilst his good wife and cute little sproglets are away visiting the mother-in-law. And then there’s When a Stranger Calls (1979) and Panic Room (2002) and the controversial Austrian art-house flick Funny Games (1997), described by critic Jacques Rivette as, I quote, “A disgrace… vile…. a complete piece of shit”, a film when first shown at Cannes (according to that trusty sword of truth, Wikipedia), a third of the audience walked out. Which, of course, immediately makes me want to see it.
Which takes us to Phillip Noyce’s maritime thriller, Dead Calm (1989). A film, I think, that fits within the genre, even if home is replaced by boat. Set almost entirely on a rather desirable yacht in the middle of the Pacific (or rather two of them, as the other boat (or ship?) is a schooner or more accurately, a brigantine), Sam Neill plays John Ingram, a forty-something captain in Her Majesty’s Royal Australian Navy, and Nicole Kidman (Rae) is his permed, twenty-something wife — in, I think, one of her first major cinematic appearances, or at least, a performance which brought her to the attention of Hollywood producers. And just like the married couple in Don’t Look Now (1974), (or Voices (1973) for that matter), they’re grieving for their young daughter, killed in a tragic accident.
So all’s going fine and dandy, until they’re suddenly becalmed, alone in the middle of nowhere, apart from a sinister brigantine which appears on the horizon. There’s a hint of piracy or Robert Louis Stevenson, or of a ghost ship, like The Flying Dutchman or the Marie Celeste. Enter Hughie Warriner (Billy Zane), a sort of hybrid between a deranged Californian hippie and a late 1980s American Psycho (is the man wearing eyeliner?). Zane’s great. The most appropriate surname. There’s this bit early on in the film, in which Rae finds Hughie dancing alone on the deck to a ghetto blaster like a drugged-out extra from Woodstock, and that’s one of the first indications that, apart from his obvious unsavoury qualities, their new buddy ain’t quite right in the head.
