Dead Calm

As we entered the 1990s, the era of sleazy sex thrillers, genre fans exited the previous decade with the parting gift of 1989’s Dead Calm. The Phillip Noyce–directed, George Miller–produced, Australian-made movie veered into racy, provocative territory without neglecting its main mission of delivering unadulterated edge-of-your-seat suspense.

The opening scenes, depicting the devastating loss of a young boy in a car accident, announce that the film will be a rocky, harrowing journey. In mourning, the kid’s parents, Rae and John Ingram (Nicole Kidman and Sam Neill), take to the open seas with their dog for some peace and healing. Aboard their yacht mid-Pacific, they catch sight of the Orpheus, a sinking schooner whose sole survivor of an apparent food-poisoning outbreak, Hughie (Billy Zane), takes refuge with them. In one of those inevitable “don’t do it!” moments, John leaves his wife alone on the yacht with the stranger (locked up… but of course not for long), and becomes trapped on the foundering vessel while investigating Hughie’s suspect account of his crew’s demise. Rae is left to fend for herself, taking part in a violent and sometimes seductive battle of wits with Hughie, a bona fide psychopath who knows how to charm (Zane’s specialty), as his behavior becomes progressively more unhinged.

Loosely based on Charles Williams’s 1963 novel—also the source of Orson Welles’s unfinished film The Deep, shot between 1966-69, starring himself, his lover Oja Kodar, Laurence Harvey, Michael Bryant, and Jeanne Moreau (in a role that didn’t make it from the book into Noyce’s version)—Dead Calm features spectacular direction, a haunting early score by Graeme Revell, and striking cinematography by the Oscar-winning DP Dean Semler (The Road Warrior). But it’s the performances by its three leads that make the film so enduring. Playing against a breathtaking backdrop of the Great Barrier Reef, the compact cast of Kidman, Neill, and Zane work harmoniously together, with a gorgeously natural 21-year-old Kidman in an early breakthrough role standing out in particular. The film is a true terror treat by an underrated director—who next made the delightful Rutger Hauer action vehicle Blind Fury—and it never loses its sense of unease. Dead Calm is a tight, claustrophobic, on-the-water masterwork—with scenes of John exploring the sinking ship the most chilling, and the dog’s fate the most upsetting—that plays just as well today as it did back in 1989, even with its tacked-on, studio-dictated ending.