Perdidos
This is a remake of Open Water 2: Adrift. It’s better than it sounds, but I haven’t seen the original.
The basic synopsis is that some old time friends get together again after a few years and they go out into the open sea on a yatch of the jock. Said jock lives off daddy’s money, and already has a sexy girl with him on the boat when the other people arrive. They are joined by a couple with a small baby, in which the wife was an old girlfriend of said jock, and the husband would rather do something else. Their marriage is going through a rough patch (postnatal depression, I assume), but they are taking some days off to let off steam. The baby goes on the boat, which is a good excuse to avoid uninteresting conversations. Finally, there’s the other pair. She travels the world living life to the fullest, and reunites here with his old flame.
The stinger is that everyone jumps into the water at the same time and no one lowers the ladder, so they are stuck swimming besides the boat and trying to reach the top. Shit happens and people die.
It’s an excuse plot and the characters are basic archetypes, so this hinges on the ability of the actors to play their part. My response to that is: Mission fucking accomplished. Outstanding performances by everyone, even from the less experienced actors. This kind of gimmicks usually turns the film into a borefest of “Doing X, but IN THE WATER”, but not here, there’s a clear goal for the characters and the journey is more important than the destination.
As usual for this director and his team, the cinematography is really good. It manages to transport you into the scene in a very effective way. Gotta be tough to film this in the ocean.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.