Adrift

Baltasar Kormákur refused to work in a tank when he adapted Tami Oldham Ashcraft’s 2002 memoir Red Sky in Mourning; he told the studio it was the only way he would make it. The unit shot on open ocean off Fiji for roughly five weeks, riding two hours out to sea each day. Shailene Woodley came in during the writing and carries a producer credit as well. In the real crossing the yacht Hazaña was being delivered from Tahiti toward San Diego. Hurricane Raymond caught them on 12 October 1983; Ashcraft came round about 27 hours later to find Richard Sharp’s safety line empty. She reached Hilo, Hawaii after 41 days, navigating with a sextant and a wristwatch. The film declines to show that solitude plainly. It keeps Sharp on deck and holds its accounting for the end, and the structural cost is real: the Tahiti courtship keeps cutting in, so the survival track is repeatedly interrupted by scenes in which both of them are safe. The credits then run photographs, clippings and video of the actual Tami and Richard. A good fit if you accept the post-storm material being broken up by courtship flashbacks all the way through. Not for anyone who wants the isolation of Ashcraft’s own account; the film delays that deliberately.