Adrift review: Combines staring into the abyss with conventional romantic drama

The film drifts very far off course and struggles to rediscover any meaningful sense of direction

Dir, Baltasar Kormakur, 96 mins, starring: Shailene Woodley, Sam Claflin, Grace Palmer, Jeffrey Thomas, Elizabeth Hawthorne

Adrift is the latest in an increasingly long line of yarns about sailing trips that have gone disastrously wrong. It follows in the slipstream of such recent nautical tales as The Mercy and All Is Lost. The twist here, a slightly perverse one, is that the film combines staring into the abyss with elements of a very conventional romantic drama.

Shailene Woodley, also one of the producers, stars as Tami Oldham, a footloose young American who has left home in San Diego to backpack her way around the world. It’s the early 1980s. She has reached as far as Tahiti when she meets Richard Sharp (Sam Claflin), a strapping, handsome and young English sailor who has his own yacht. They quickly fall in love.

The film is full of flashbacks. It opens with the calamity. Tami wakes up below deck with a bleeding, badly bruised head to discover that a huge storm has all but capsized the boat. Richard has fallen overboard and water is seeping into the hull. From this cheery starting point, we are taken back and forth in time. We learn how the couple met.

We see them in the first throes of romance. We discover just why they were sailing across the Pacific. We are also continually jolted back to the present, where Tami is in a desperate fight to survive. She spots Richard clinging to the lifeboat, swims out to him and manages to drag him back on board. His ribs are broken. One of his legs is shattered.

In an early scene, Richard tries to explain the allure of long-distance sailing trips. As he tells Tami, you’re likely to be damp, hungry and miserable throughout the voyage. You may even begin to hallucinate in your more desperate moments. However, you can also see into the “infinite horizon”. There is something transcendent about the experience which he struggles to put into words.

The impressive Woodley throws herself into her role as the exhausted, dehydrated and delirious heroine who just won’t let the elements beat her.

Icelandic director Baltasar Kormakur seems drawn to stories of disaster and what they reveal about the humans caught in the chaos. (He also made epic disaster movie Everest). On a formal level, this is accomplished filmmaking. We see plenty of high angle shots of the tiny ship below as well as juddering scenes of the storm itself and of the boat being tossed like a cork on the waves.

Between times, we are treated to beautiful imagery of sunsets, passing clouds and marine life. What the film lacks, though, is any dramatic tension. There is a huge plot twist here – one hinted at when Richard is trying to describe the fatal lure of the ocean and what it can do to your mind. Even this twist can’t put wind behind the sails of what turns into an increasingly torpid affair.

We’re stuck at sea with the couple as the food and water run out and their plight becomes ever more desperate. Like them, we begin to get cabin fever. The attempts at interweaving the love story with an existential meditation on human nature and the will to survive are only fitfully effective.

Like the two young sailors on their ill-fated voyage, the film drifts very far off course and struggles to rediscover any meaningful sense of direction.

‘Adrift’ hits UK cinemas 29 June