| Warner Bros. | Release Date: April 7, 1989 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
11
Mixed:
5
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
Rippling with resonance, Dead Calm is Jaws in a human form, a shape profoundly complete and completely disturbing. [07 Apr 1989]
Cinematogapher Dean Semler gets amazing colours as the sun sets, and there’s a bravely avant-garde debut score from Kiwi composer Graeme Revell, pumping up the pulse with sinister breathing sounds. The plot even thrives on a tacit cultural tension between the Australian stars and the arrogant interloper.
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Dead Calm generates genuine tension, because the story is so simple and the performances are so straightforward. This is not a gimmick film (unless you count the husband's method of escaping from the sinking ship), and Kidman and Zane do generate real, palpable hatred in their scenes together.
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Though it lacks Alfred Hitchcock's wry and macabre sense of humor, DEAD CALM is a cracklingly good, cold-blooded film that never lets up in its truly Hitchcockian suspense. Under the gripping direction of Phillip Noyce, the film sustains tension and power beautifully, right through to its startling conclusion.
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Though the film resorts to a hackneyed ending, what goes on before is modest but effective terror. [07 Apr 1989, p.A]
The best that can be said about Dead Calm is that director Phillip Noyce maintains nearly constant tension and finds a surprising number of ways to evoke menace in confined spaces. [07 Apr 1989, p.7]
Thanks to fuzzy motivation, snicker-bait melodramatics and craters in logic, Calm quickly disintegrates into a might-have-been. [07 Apr 1989, p.6D]
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