Canada | 2019 | Directed by Rob Grant
Logline: Three close friends find themselves stranded at sea and are forced to confront dark secrets and desperate measures in order to survive.
Richard (Christopher Gray) is a son of a wealthy asshole, and young Dick hasn’t fallen far from the tree. Jonah (Munro Chambers) is his best buddy, and has spent much of the friendship feeling rather thankless. Sasha (Emily Tyra) is Richard’s girlfriend. She’s a feisty type, and divides her time playing lover and mediator. Her role will play a pivotal part in this triangle.
Things get off to a rocky start. Richard is furious. He’s angry a lot of the time. Now he’s pissed off with Jonah, believing that his pal has screwed him over by screwing his girlfriend, so he pummels the hell out of the poor bastard, until Sasha sorts him out with further information. Richard needs to make amends, so he invites them onto his father’s cruiser for a relaxing day on the deep blue sea, where he can use his brand new harpoon – er, spear gun – a birthday gift from Jonah and Sasha.
It gets to the pointy end rather quickly, and one stupid decision leads to another, especially after many beers and gin & tonics. Richard’s back to his usual sociopathic self, and Jonah’s once again on the receiving end. Sasha is in the middle, and before you can say “Jonathon Livingston Seagull” there’s blood, blood everywhere, and all the boards did shrink.
Rob Grant has fashioned a career with small, independently-produced genre twists, focusing on micro-budget concept-heavy, dialogue driven chamber pieces, such as Mon Ami and Desolate. His latest is very reminiscent of Polanski’s first feature, Knife on the Water, in terms of dynamics, combined with some of the nasty shenanigans of Donkey Punch. It’s a three-hander, set almost entirely aboard a pleasure boat, but there’s little pleasure to be had for these schmucks.
Grant’s screenplay (with help from Mike Kovac) pitches and rolls, revealing more and more about each character as they stumble over and into each other, trying to retain some semblance of power and keep at least one ace up their sleeve. It’s all ludicrous, but you take it with several grains of sea salt. Richard is mostly the obnoxious one, Jonah is mostly pathetic, and Sasha is somewhere in between. Which makes it hard to feel any real empathy for any of them. But, thankfully Grant pushes the b-movie trappings as far as they’ll go, shoving them all hard into the corners, and squeezing every bit of blood. And there’s plenty of that.
In fact, it’s not often I gag in horror movies, but I found myself genuinely revolted in a scene that involves a seagull. Well played Grant, well played. Excellent special effects makeup work is employed from designer Rob Trainor, with a real rip-doozy near the end of the movie. Also strong is the score from Michelle Osis. Performances are okay – including bone dry-witted narration from Brett Gelman – and they keep each other afloat, but there’s no acting prizes here. This is a beer and sailor sandwich - cheddar and raw onion - flick, the more beer you consume, the tastier the sandwich gets. Jump onboard.