A young woman is rescued off the coart of Scotland from a small boat designed for ocean rowing. She was part of a crew who were trying to break a record by rowing from Newfoundland to Ireland in under 28 days. Someething went horribly wrong, but what.
Beginning toward the end of the tale and then flashing backward through found footage and the woman's fragmented memories, this is a tale that we have to piece together. It is a tale where we don't have all the bits until the end and we have to stay present and engaged so that we pick up everything we need to.
It's a spectacular film that has some of the most visually over powering images you'll see all year. We are there, on the ocean in fair weather and foul. The images go a long way to keeping us interested and if the year end awards and the Oscars noticed small films like this it would be on near the top of the list.
The spectacular images help distract the audience from noticing that the rest of the film is a mess.
Beginning with a cast, none of whom look like long distance rowers, the film quickly loses credibility. Seriously, the cast looks good but none of them look like they could row for 28 days. Their bodies look like regular people and not like the the cut musicular people who normally do this ort of thing. Their hands, other than some bandages don't have the calases that they would have from holding oars for hours.
The script also doesn't make a great deal of sense. From the crew of a World record attempt just heading out alone with no fan fare and no sense of them having a support team (they should have something as the recent ocean rowing doc ROW FOR LIFE shows), to characters throwing needed equipment overboard to make the boat lighter, to questions about why no one touches the rescue beacon, to the final denouncement which mght explain a few things, but also comes across as a huge WTF on a couple of levels (it potentially throws out most of what we've seen with one sentence because of the implication), all of this is just nonsense if yout think about it. I suspect the fragmentary telling is to hide the flaws. .
I completely understand why this film has played numerous festivals (Raindance and Scary Movies), it looks so good that if you get lost in what is happening as it happens and you don't think about anything it is great, but the problem is the pacing allows doubts to appear and that final turn just made my jaw drop. Perhaps if this wasn't two hours and moved faster this would have played better and I wouldn't have cought the "errors".
Wwhile not bad, it just isn't as great as the visuals.
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