Australian Naval officer John Ingram (Sam Neill) returns home to tragedy. His wife Rae (Nicole Kidman) was driving to pick him up when she crashed killing their infant son. After her recovery, they get away from the world by sailing a yacht. She is haunted by the loss. They encounter troubled Hughie Warriner (Billy Zane) rowing a boat over to them in the middle of the ocean. He claims his boat is adrift and the others dead. John is suspicious and rows over to the boat.It is a Hitchcockian thriller. There is great tension from the moment Billy Zane first step on their boat. He has great creepiness and danger. Sam Neill is a solid lead. It's the first movie that I saw Nicole Kidman in and she was a revelation. It's a sparse movie but deadly. There is a weird ending that is almost dreamlike in its unreal feel unlike the rest of the movie.

Despite its age, I still see DEAD CALM as a pretty definitive seafaring thriller. To be more precise, it's a psychological thriller, one of many that were all the rage back in the late '80s and early '90s: FATAL ATTRACTION kick-started the sub genre, and there were many interesting choices along the way. For me, the two pinnacles of the genre are this film and THE HAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE.The plot is deceptively simple, making use of just three actors. There's a loving couple, traumatised by events of the recent past, and a mysterious stranger hiding dark secrets. What follows is a hold-your-breath tense thrill-ride packed with twists and life-or-death situations. I loved the eerily isolated backdrop and director Phillip Noyce – who's made a career of edgy, dark filmmaking – makes perfect use of a small yacht to imprison his lead characters. The acting is also fine, which is a plus as if it hadn't been this film would have lost a lot of its charisma. Sam Neill is the sterling, never-give-up hero, and Billy Zane excels as the genuinely frightening psychopath, always retaining a hint of sympathy about him. But the film belongs to Nicole Kidman, who stars as the grieving woman forced to become a warrior to save both her husband's life and her own.Although I'm not a big fan of Kidman, I believe this to be one of her best performances, and it's hard to fault. She's fragile and gutsy, weak and powerful, all in the same breath, and watching her cat-and-mouse antics with Zane is what suspenseful filmmaking is all about. DEAD CALM is a classic thriller thanks to its pure simplicity.

A mass-murderer (Billy Zane) kidnaps and seduces a young woman (Nicole Kidman) after leaving her husband (Sam Neill) to die on the vessel whose crew he has just slaughtered.This is a great thriller, and really gets to the heart of what makes thrillers work: vulnerability, desperation, isolation. There is so much tension and suspense here. We know as film-goers that things will probably turn out alright (because we all want that happy ending) but will we get what we want? The film has added gravitas because the three main cast members have all grown in stature since. Neill got big a few years later in "Jurassic Park", Zane really hit his stride in "Titanic", and Kidman was already known for things like "Days of Thunder" but this pushed her even further out there. So interesting to watch this now, three stars before their prime.

Released in 1989, "Dead Calm" is the story of a grieving Australian couple vacationing 1200 miles from land on their yacht in the South Pacific (Sam Neill and Nicole Kidman). Horror ensues after they rescue a stranger from a small dinghy (Billy Zane) and the built-in protections of civilization are nowhere to be found."Dead Calm" is one of the greatest horror/thrillers ever made. The "monster" is human – a psycho nut job -- which isn't anything new, of course. It's the confined location of the open sea and the cut-off-from-the-world atmosphere that make "Dead Calm" great, along with all-around excellent filmmaking, including the breathtaking cinematography and magnificent score by Graeme Revell.Neill shows that he has the gravitas to carry a film as the male protagonist, which is why he was snagged for 1993's "Jurassic Park." Kidman similarly shines as the female protagonist in her first major motion picture. Incidentally, Neill was 41 and Kidman 21 at the time of filming. Likewise, Zane de-shines as the antagonist and shows why he was picked for the villain of 1997's "Titanic." There's not much dialogue because this is a visually/musically based film and not dialogue-driven. As such, the acting HAS to be absolutely convincing, and so it is.The film runs 96 minutes and was shot off the east coast of Australia (Gold Coast, Great Barrier Reef, etc.).GRADE: A