Dead Calm (1989) on Netflix
R19891h 36mDramaHorrorThriller
Rae and John Ingram sail their yacht, the Saracen, into the Pacific after their son's death. A stranger rows over from a sinking schooner and says the other passengers are dead.
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- Netflix3.8/5
- IMDb6.8/1049,141 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes84%
Trailer
Plot summary
Rae Ingram is grieving after a car crash killed her young son. Her husband, John Ingram, a captain in the Royal Australian Navy, suggests a vacation at sea aboard their yacht, the Saracen. Out in the Pacific, they sight a schooner drifting with water coming aboard. A man rows a dinghy across to them, badly distressed. He gives his name as Hughie Warriner and says the schooner is going under and that the rest of the people aboard died of food poisoning ten days before. He sleeps aboard the Saracen while John, suspicious, rows out to the other vessel to look it over.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Dead Calm (1989)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- An earlier attempt to film the novel, by Orson Welles, was plagued by financial and technical problems and was halted at the end of 1969. Principal photography remained incomplete, Laurence Harvey's death in 1973 ended any hope of completing it, and the original negative is considered lost, though two workprints survive.
SPOILER
The ending in which John kills Hughie with a flare was filmed seven months after principal photography finished, at Warner Bros.'s request. The studio disliked the ambiguous original ending, in which Rae sets Hughie adrift on a life raft to die at sea, and wanted a definite fate for him.- Dead Calm was the first ever film score for New Zealand musician Graeme Revell, of the industrial group SPK, who composed and performed it, and it earned him an AFI Award for Best Original Music Score.
- George Miller directed some sequences of Dead Calm himself, among them one in which Sam Neill's character is tormented in the boat by a shark, and that scene was dropped from the final cut of the film.
