Main Crew: prod, Terry Hayes, Doug Mitchell, George Miller; dir, Phillip Noyce; writ, Terry Hayes (based on the novel by Charles Williams); dop, Dean Semler; ed, Richard Francis-Bruce; mus, Graeme Revell; prod d, Graham Walker; art d, Kimble Hilder; cos, Norma Moriceau.
Phillip Noyce's Dead Calm (1989) is a masterful Hitchcockian exercise in audience manipulation. Just as the title's duplicity suggests juxtaposing emotive responses, Noyce has, right from the outset, skilfully balanced the peaks and troughs of the thriller in order to produce maximum emotive response.
Within the film's dramatic opening moments, in which the child of Rae (Nicole Kidman) and John (Sam Neill) is killed in a motor accident, Noyce executes a slow dissolve from the heart-wrenching image of a traumatised Kidman to the soothing, calm waters of the Pacific Ocean. From that point on, the expansive, lifeless ocean becomes a recurring motif to mark troughs in the film's intensity. The water also is also used to represent a barrier, a seemingly transparent, knowable substance whose shiny façade hides a mysterious interior - just like Hughie Warriner (Billy Zane).
The Titanic's (1997) Billy Zane appears unexpectedly from the Ocean and just as his materialisation holds mysteries, so does his situation. A dead crew is harboured within his sinking boat - a mystery that John discovers soon after Hughie's acceptance onto Saracen - the boat John shares with Rae. John, playing out an established convention of the thriller/horror genre, makes his biggest mistake by entering the villain's lair. Hughie assaults Rae before heading off in the Saracen, leaving John in the vulnerable position of manning Hughie's sinking ship.
Aboard the ship, John stumbles across evidence of Hughie's shocking history, as well as various phallic symbols that both indicate Hughie's vile intentions and John's induced paranoid state. The portrayal of John's chaotic claustrophobic, isolated state shares elements with Proyas' Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of the Clouds (1989) and the previous Kennedy-Miller co-production Mad Max (1979). Of course, this is another of the film's complex duplicities. While Hughie's psychosis had undoubtedly increased as a result of his long-term isolation at sea, resulting in his failure to adapt to normal life, John, a desperate protector of his family unit, is forced into a helpless position, and thus begins his descent into paranoia.
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