Dead Calm (1989)

Directed by Phillip Noyce. Starring Nicole Kidman, Billy Zane, Sam Neill. [R]

Reeling from a family tragedy, Aussie naval officer Neill and young wife Kidman are taking a vacation on their yacht in the middle of the Pacific when they pick up a stranger (Zane) rowing over from a slowly-sinking schooner who then proceeds to jettison the husband and terrorize the wife. Tense, well-crafted thriller eventually succumbs to genre clichés in the final act (e.g., why kill or dump the maniac overboard when he can be tied up with rope for a chance to escape?), but is otherwise an effective potboiler elevated by gripping direction and more-than-capable performances. Kidman is too tenacious and resourceful to ever become a shrieking damsel, Neill favors quiet suspicions and level-headed survival techniques over anger and hysterics, and Zane makes for a queasily unbalanced psychopath. Stark ocean scenery, eerily feverish score, and creative camerawork in confined spaces contribute to the white-knuckle suspense, although the film would have been better off dropping the prologue and epilogue altogether (at the very least, rewritten that studio-mandated ending). From the Kennedy Miller production house, with George Miller and Terry Hayes co-producing; the latter also scripted from Charles Williams’ novel.

77/100