31 Days of Halloween

Warning: A couple of spoilers in this one
Yuppie Horror Crash Course, installment 2: Given that it’s set on a damn yacht, Dead Calm would seem to be the yuppiest of yuppie horror films. However, it actually differs from other movies in the genre in a handful of ways. The most obvious is that it’s clearly a larger production than most of these movies given that it’s set on the open sea in a couple of boats. Also, while it is technically a movie about a crazy person entering the lives of an unsuspecting family, the fact that he’s crazy is made clear pretty quickly and there isn’t the same creeping dread about the fact that the yuppies are in an increasing amount of danger. In fact, it plays out much more like a straight-up adventure movie than I was expecting. The film opens on a horrific accident in which a married couple’s child is killed and I was kind of expecting the film to take on an Antichrist-like tone of greif-stricken isolation that would inform the rest of the movie, but they actually forget about that loss pretty quickly and just focus on their own predicament for most of the movie.

The couple in question are played by Sam Neill and Nicole Kidman, who both give reasonable if unspectacular performances. The more questionable casting is probably Billy Zane, as the lunatic who sets off this series of unfortunate events. This is a character who should have dominated the film, but I don’t really know that Zane brought the overwhelming menace he needed to. It’s kind of a waste because this is an open invitation to chew the hell out of a lot of scenery and there are other actors who could have done a lot with it. Otherwise I’d say that the movie plays out at a consistent B+ level, with some tense scenes played very well and other scenes sort of botched. This is one of those thrillers where you sometimes feel like the protagonists are making a lot of blunders just to keep the film going which they otherwise wouldn’t make. Kidman is probably given a half dozen opportunities to kill Zane which go unused for example. Still the movie does a reasonably good job of keeping things going and mixing it up over the course of the film.

If there’s one thing worth examining more deeply it’s probably the film’s gender politics. Some of the film’s more rapey elements would probably not go over very well today, but there is an inversion of the damsel in distress trope going on here that is worth commenting on. Once the main conflict is in place it seems like we’re meant to expect Kidman to be held captive as Neil rushes to save her, but this isn’t how it plays out. Rather, Kidman ends up saving herself (more or less) and it ends up being Neil who needs to be saved by Kidman at the end (at least until the obviously studio mandated coda at the end which is best left ignored). It’s stuff like that which gives Dead Calm the appearance of something special, but really it’s kind of a missed opportunity. It’s got a good setup but never really gets the psychological tone right and I think it indulged some dumb studio notes. Still, it’s a serviceable thriller which definitely has its moments.
*** out of Four