Adrift (2018)
★★★ — Adrift (2018)
Based on the true story of Tami Oldham and Richard Sharp, Adrift (2018) recounts one of the more remarkable survival stories to come out of the 1983 Pacific hurricane season. The pair, both experienced sailors, were caught in the path of Hurricane Raymond while delivering a yacht from Tahiti to San Diego. Tami Oldham wrote about her experience in a 1998 memoir, Red Sky in Mourning, which forms the source material here. The film arrived in cinemas courtesy of STXfilms, Lakeshore Entertainment and Reykjavik-based RVK Studios, running at a brisk 96 minutes and balancing its survival drama against the romance at its core.
At the helm is Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur, a filmmaker who has made a career of placing ordinary people in physically extreme situations. His previous English-language work includes survival pictures that traded on visceral, location-driven tension, and Adrift fits that pattern neatly enough, even if the film has a quieter, more introspective register than you might expect from the premise. The Icelandic co-production strand is something of a recurring thread on this blog: if you want a flavour of what Iceland's film industry has been putting out around the same period, the reviews of Winter Brothers (2017) and Unknown Soldier (2017) are worth a look, both being Icelandic productions from around the same era.
Shailene Woodley plays Tami Oldham and carries the bulk of the film's emotional and physical weight, appearing in almost every scene. It is a performance built on endurance rather than showmanship, which either works for you or it does not. Sam Claflin plays Richard Sharp, and the two share a screen chemistry that the film leans on heavily, given how little else it is willing to offer in the way of conventional incident. Woodley in particular had already demonstrated a talent for grounded, understated work before this, and the role suits that quality. The supporting cast, including Jeffrey Thomas and Elizabeth Hawthorne, appear primarily in the film's flashback sequences, which Kormákur weaves into the present-day survival story in a structural choice that is polished but unremarkable. For those interested in how romance functions under pressure in other films covered here, the review of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) and the rather different tonal register of I'm Drunk, I Love You (2017) offer some useful comparison points.
A-Z World Movie Tour Bosnia & Herzegovina Adrift feels like sitting in on a long, quiet conversation between two people who’ve run out of small talk. It’s the cinematic equivalent of staring at a coffee cup while someone unpacks their entire life philosophy. Slow, sparse, but oddly sticky in hindsight. The film’s minimalist approach is both its strength and its snooze button. Most of the runtime is just two characters in a room, arguing, reminiscing, or just… existing. At times, I caught myself checking if my tea had gone cold, but there’s something about the rawness of it that lingers. The dialogue isn’t flashy, but it digs into the kind of existential questions that haunt you after: What does it mean to truly know someone? Can we ever escape the past? The two leads are the glue holding this ship together. No explosions, no dramatic score, just their faces carrying decades of history between them. You don’t "watch" their conflict so much as "feel" it, like a slow leak in a tire. The Director uses silence like a scalpel, carving out moments that feel painfully human. One scene, where a character meticulously folds a pile of clothes while talking about loss, hit harder than most three-act dramas. But yeah, if you’re looking for a thrill ride, this’ll test your patience. Would I recommend it? If you’ve got a rainy afternoon and a penchant for brooding, introspective stories, absolutely. It’s not a film you 'enjoy' so much as one you 'absorb'. Final verdict: A slow burn with sharp emotional embers. 3 stars for mood.
That slow-leak quality is something I keep coming back to, days after watching. It is not a film that announces itself, and I suspect a lot of people will bounce off it entirely in the first half hour, which is fair enough. But there is something to be said for a film that trusts its two leads to do the work without dressing everything up in spectacle. The structural decision to cut between past and present, which at first feels like a safety net for an otherwise very spare story, gradually earns its place. It does not make the film exciting, exactly, but it gives the emotional payoff somewhere to land. Whether that is enough will depend entirely on what you are in the mood for. Sometimes a slow leak is all a film needs to be.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2018 | Watched: 2025-05-29
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Adrift (2018) on YouTube
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: MGM Plus Amazon Channel
Buy: Sky Store
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Hulu
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from Iceland: Winter Brothers (2017) · Unknown Soldier (2017)
More from the 2010s: Wonder (2017) · Beautiful Boy (2018) · The Witch (2015) · What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
More thriller: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Angst (1983) · The Long Walk (2025) · Punishment Park (1971)
More romance: The Eagle (1925) · The Last Picture Show (1971) · The General (1926) · The Docks of New York (1928)
