Water, like the human psyche, is unpredictable and full of beasts lurking in the depths, and so it says a lot about our primal fear of the ocean that boat movies often offer threats either under the surface, in the shape of sharks, or psychosis or both. With Row, a smattering of startling jump cuts showing blood splashed around a boat and flashbacks of the protagonist Megan (Bella Dayne, very impressive) screaming, but the viewer needs to wait out a somewhat unreasonably long running time to find out if the antagonists here are biting fish or knife-wielding killers.
All we know at first is that Megan is the only survivor of an attempt to break the record for rowing across the Atlantic from Newfoundland to the UK with four crew members, two men and two women. Having washed up on the Orkney island of Hoy, Megan spends most of the film’s present tense in bed recovering when she’s not telling DCI MacKelly (Tam Dean Burn) what happened after she, her best friend Lexi (a sparky Sophie Skelton), captain Daniel (Akshay Khanna) and mystery man Mike (Nick Skaugen), a last-minute replacement for Lexi’s boyfriend Adam (Mark Strepan), set off on their voyage. But how reliable is Megan as a narrator?
Writer-director Matthew Losasso, making his feature debut with this, dispenses the reveals with skill, although there are a few stumbles in the motivational logic and a somewhat murky final five minutes of twistiness, which maybe torques the narrative a half turn too much. Nevertheless, for a film with such a small, mostly unknown cast and presumably a limited budget, the effects are very impressive, especially when the boat is storm tossed on waves the size of whales. Like the film itself, the little vessel has a surprisingly large arsenal of tech at its disposal, but of course bad things happen, sometimes by accident and sometimes by cruel design. Despite the aforementioned limitations, Row pulls together surprisingly well, thanks in part to the ensemble’s intense chemistry, striking cinematography and especially fine use of sound and score.
• Row is in UK cinemas from 5 September.
