Stylish but barely mediocre overall

It's hard to see any effort in the film. There's no comedy to speak of, no real drama and, worst of all.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

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.

This movie makes me wonder on how movies should be rated.. In terms of achieving its goal of being an intense, enjoyable thriller I have to admit that his movie gets 10/10. However, I can not really give it a 10/10 without being unfair to great deeper movies like "A beautiful mind","American History X" and so on. Anyways, sorry for the general wondering and let me get back to the point. The plot is nice and fast-moving, as it should be for a thriller, and it definitely has strong moments. In addition, the cast is literally fantastic. Sam Neil is a master when it comes to horror/thriller movies, Billy Zane also performs really well and the same goes for a young Nicole Kidman. Some of the effects looked a bit cheap but today's standards but it is not a special effect based movie anyways.

Decent thriller. Original setting and plot. Good direction by Phillip Noyce: good build-up and tension is maintained well. Could easily have degenerated into usual psychological-drama/slasher-horror stuff but there are enough sub-plots and ebbs and flows to keep it interesting.On the down side, some parts of the plot feel contrived and implausible.Good work from Sam Neill and Nicole Kidman in the lead roles, and even Billy Zane is okay in his role. Interesting to note that this was Kidman's last movie before hitting the Hollywood big time (and meeting Tom Cruise...). Her next movie was Days of Thunder...

An excellent, sparse thriller. I think it'd be one of the greats if not for the opening and closing sequences. The opening one, about Nicole Kidman's and Sam Neil's loss of their son, could have easily been explained with dialogue - or not, since it never really comes back up again and only serves to slightly inform the audience of their emotional state. It compromises the rest of the film, though, which is set at sea. Kidman and Neil are on a long sailing trip when they come upon a stalled yacht. Before they even have much of a thought about it, a young man (Billy Zane) rows over to their boat as quick as his muscles will guide him. He claims that everyone else on the boat died of food poisoning and that it's now sinking, but Neil doesn't buy it. When Zane falls asleep, he rows over there himself and finds that everyone else has been murdered. Zane wakes up while Neil is gone and commandeers his own boat - and kidnaps his wife. Neil, an experienced sailor, fixes the other yacht and chases after them. Man, this is tense stuff, and all three of the actors are brilliant. It's too bad about that final sequence, which harms the movie far more than the unnecessary opening sequence. Supposedly test audiences reacted badly to the original ending, so they had to wrap it up more neatly in a bow, which just sucks. Well, I guess it's the film's only laugh, so there's that.