Review: Adrift

In 1983, Tami Oldham Aschraft and her fiancee Richard Sharp were tasked to take a 44-foot yacht from Tahiti to San Diego. It was a 4,000-mile journey that was meant to take a month or so, and all seemed smooth sailing until disaster in the form of one Hurricane Raymond struck.

Based on Ashcraft's memoir Red Sky in the Morning: A True Story of Love, Loss and Survival at Sea, Adrift functions as both survival story and love story as screenwriters Aaron Kandell, Jordan Kandell and David Branson Smith go back and forth between the present as Tami deals with the storm's aftermath and the past as she and Richard begin their relationship.

When they first meet in Tahiti, Tami (Shailene Woodley, who also serves as one of the film's producers) is 23 and holding down odd jobs as she makes her way through the world. Working in the marina, she meets Richard (Sam Claflin), a few years older and seemingly her kindred spirit. He's a sailor who's traveled much of the world in the boat that he himself built. Restless for adventure, she wonders what life on sea is like. Miserable, he replies, cold and awful - if you aren't sunburnt, you're seasick, sleep-deprived or all three. Yet there's something indescribable about the experience, he says, it's like being reborn.

Having to survive at sea may not be one's idea of being reborn, but it does force Tami to dig deep within herself. When she awakens after the disaster, the cabin is filled with water and debris and Richard is nowhere to be found. When she does finally spot him floating in the water and somehow lifts him back onto the boat, he's weak and injured. So it's up to Tami to mend the boat the best she can, pumping out the water, jerry-rigging the sail, and using a sextant to navigate the 1,500 miles to Hawaii.

It's a harrowing and inspirational tale in equal measure and yet, much like Woodley's performance, pragmatic and subdued when it could very well have tipped into melodramatics. Certainly it's formulaic and the looks into the idyllic past don't necessarily contribute to the dire present, but the structure has a cumulative power that keeps one compelled. Director Baltasar Kormákur knows his way around a disaster movie, having helmed another true-life survival tale in Everest, and the storm sequence is suitably terrifying. Every heave of the ocean suffocates the frame, every groan of the battered boat is heard to nauseating effect, and every screaming cry from Woodley's Tami filled with grief, grit, despair, and desperation.

Adrift

Directed by: Baltasar Kormákur

Written by: Aaron Kandell, Jordan Kandell, David Branson Smith; based on the memoir Red Sky in the Morning: A True Story of Love, Loss and Survival at Sea by Tami Oldman Ashcraft

Starring: Shailene Woodley, Sam Claflin