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Open Water 2: Adrift

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Open water 2 : adrift, open water 2: adrift.

Directed by Hans Horn

Fatigue. Hypothermia. Death.

A weekend cruise on a luxurious party yacht goes horribly wrong for a group of old high-school friends when they get stuck in the water many miles from shore and a happy reunion turns into a fight for survival.

Susan May Pratt Eric Dane Richard Speight Jr. Niklaus Lange Ali Hillis Cameron Richardson

Director Director

Producers producers.

Dan Maag Philip Schulz-Deyle Hendrik Holler

Writers Writers

Adam Kreutner David Mitchell

Original Writer Original Writer

Kōji Suzuki

Casting Casting

Nancy Nayor Kelly Wagner

Editor Editor

Christian Lonk

Cinematography Cinematography

Bernhard Jasper

Assistant Director Asst. Director

Hendrik Holler

Executive Producer Exec. Producer

Stephan Barth

Production Design Production Design

Visual effects visual effects.

Sebastian Faber

Stunts Stunts

Wolfgang Raach

Composer Composer

Gerd Baumann

Sound Sound

Alexander Buck Emil Klotzsch Guido Zettier

Peter Rommel Productions Orange Pictures UFA Shotgun Pictures

Primary Language

Spoken languages.

French German Spanish English

Releases by Date

10 jul 2006, 03 aug 2006, 09 aug 2006, 10 aug 2006, 18 aug 2006, 07 sep 2006, 28 sep 2006, 20 feb 2007, 27 jun 2007, 28 jul 2007, 28 feb 2007, 02 sep 2008, releases by country.

• Physical DVD
• Theatrical 12
• Theatrical 15

Netherlands

• Physical 12 DVD
• TV 12 RTL 7
• Theatrical M/14
• Theatrical R

94 mins   More at IMDb TMDb Report this page

Popular reviews

Review by soupydoupyy ★★ 8

About 4 years ago I ran into my Aunt Linda at a family event. Naturally, I made the conversation about movies. "Have you seen any good ones lately?", I asked. Immediately she told me of a movie about people trapped in the ocean because they forgot to put the ladder down of their yacht. "It's a sequel to a big movie, but it doesn't really have anything to do with the first one", she said....."That's a good sign", I thought as I rolled my eyes. "Is it Open Water 2?" "Yes! You NEED TO SEE IT!" I said I would try and see it, without really wanting to. As the years went by my Aunt Linda would ask if I…

Review by neve ★

why did no one get on someone’s shoulders until 1 hour and 18 minutes into the film ??? like ??? that would be my first thought ???

Review by Olivia ★

the heteros have done it again

Review by Asim P. ★½

the sharks be like “ I think we’ll sit this one out”

Review by nyloraced ✨ ★★

All this nonsense because they forgot to put down a ladder?????

Review by alibrarianslib ★★ 1

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

One of the chick's had a freaking life vest. My first thought is "Hmmmm, why don't we put the life vest on a dude and have a girl stand up on his back and grab the railing."

No one should have died.

Review by eva ★ 1

what the hell was the ending lmao

Review by joshrowley ★★ 3

Review by Claire Ginocchio ½

There is nothing terrifying about a bunch of idiots dying in the ocean merely because they are stupid.

Review by Blaze the Action Junkie ★★½

Promotions claim this film is based on actual events. This is false according to Google. The actual script is an adaptation of Koji Suzuki's short story Adrift, a piece of fiction. It matters little to me, most of the film's stress is centered on a mother stuck in the water just out of reach of her screaming baby, and true or not that made for a bit of a cringe-fest. I don't think I'd call the film bad for that fact, just kind of grating in a stressful thriller aspect. The acting and tension were solid for what the film is, but I thought the characters left a lot to be desired with how they were written in this one. The situation was also kind of dumb, as was the ending. Maybe if they had added sharks to the movie it could have been better..

2006 Ranked 2000’s Ranked Horror Ranked Horror in the 2000’s Ranked Open Sea Ranked

Review by mikey v ★★★

these type of movies r all i want to watch now they all suck so much i love it

Review by ✯ Miloš⑬ 💀↯ ★★★★

It's about a group of friends jumping into the water from their boat, forgetting to lower the ladder, realizing they're too far up, and getting stuck in the water many miles from shore.

I get that people found the characters annoying, but honestly, the idea of the movie is pretty exciting to see what will happen. I enjoy the atmosphere and the mid-2000s film editing, with the ending giving me goosebumps. It took me a moment to realize that the driver was played by Eric Dane, lol.

Overall, I think it's an exciting horror/thriller without any sharks, with solid acting and tons of enjoyable moments.

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In September, 1983, Tami Oldham Ashcraft and her fiance, Richard Sharp , were hired to take a 44-foot yacht on a 4,000-mile journey from Tahiti to San Diego. About halfway through their cross-Pacific journey, they ran into Hurricane Raymond, a tropical storm which had been building in power for a couple of weeks. They struggled to control the yacht in 145-knot winds, and Sharp was washed overboard, lost in the mountainous seas. Ashcraft had a head injury, and the yacht was badly damaged, but she managed to jerry-rig a sail and then navigated her way—manually, using a sextant and a watchover 1,500 miles to Hawaii. It took her an astonishing 41 days. She survived on peanut butter. In 2002, Ashcraft wrote a book about her experience, Red Sky in Mourning: A True Story of Love, Loss and Survival at Sea . “Adrift,” the film adaptation directed by Baltasar Kormákur , wears its heart on its sleeve. It’s not just a story of an incredible feat of survival. It’s also a love story, presented with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. 

When Richard ( Sam Claflin ) and Tami ( Shailene Woodley ) meet in Tahiti, she’s working in a marina, a girl already somewhat “adrift” but not really worried about it yet, and he is a yacht-owner who wants to sail around the world. Their love story involves jumping off cliffs, random laughter, and a conversation about flowers. There’s not much substance to it, and the script (by Aaron Kandell , Jordan Kandell , David Branson Smith —apparently, there wasn’t one female writer in a 4,000-mile radius who contributed to this story of a woman alone at sea) is low on subtext. The two speak their feelings bluntly (“I sailed half the world to find you”), with music swelling up on cue. All of this is pretty standard stuff, and forgivable, really. Nobody’s looking for intricate relationship subtlety in a movie like this. What we’re waiting for is the storm. 

The film starts with Tami lying injured in the interior of the yacht after the storm. The cabin is filled with water and debris. She staggers onto the deck, only to find Richard’s safety line dangling overboard. She thinks she sees Richard floating on a dinghy in the distance. Filled with determination to get to him, she mends the yacht as well as she can, pumping water out of the cabin, fixing the sail. She eventually makes it to the dinghy, and—with a superhuman effort, drags the injured Richard through the water back to the boat, and somehow (Kormákur doesn’t show us how) pulls him up the ladder onto the deck. His ribs are collapsed, his leg is badly wounded. Because this is a true story, we know Richard was swept off the boat, never to be seen again. So it’s not clear at first if they have decided to fictionalize the story, or if she is having some kind of sustained hallucination. 

“Adrift” flips back and forth between their burgeoning romance on Tahiti and the increasingly dire situation after the storm, as Tami struggles to keep herself and Richard alive. It is she who makes the decision to turn north and try to reach Hawaii, as opposed to continuing on to San Diego. It is she who rations out the food. When problems arise, she has to figure out solutions. She hovers over maps, peers through the sextant, makes calculations, all while battling dehydration (and possibly a lingering concussion from her head injury). “Adrift” shares many similarities with “ All Is Lost ,” the 2013 film starring Robert Redford , with some crucial differences. Redford is the only person in “All Is Lost.” There is no dialogue. He doesn’t talk to himself, to let us in on his thought process. There is no “ Wilson ” like in “ Cast Away ,” a device allowing the stranded character to verbalize his feelings. “All Is Lost” takes place in a vast and eerie silence. We don’t know anything about the character, we don’t know why he’s out there alone, we don’t know his onshore life. All we do is see him try—step by gritty step—to survive another day. “Adrift” avoids many of the challenges “All Is Lost” faces head on. 

Kormákur is drawn to stories about feats of survival (“ Everest ,” “The Deep”), and the sea and its storms feature strongly in his work (much of which takes place in his home country, Iceland). He’s on familiar turf. Cinematographer Robert Richardson , a frequent collaborator of Quentin Tarantino , Martin Scorsese and Oliver Stone , does tremendous work with “Adrift.” The frequent aerial shots of the tiny yacht surrounded by immense ocean are chilling: the frame looks almost existentially empty. There’s one dizzying scene in Tahiti where first Tami and then Richard leap off a cliff into a deep pool below, and it seems like Richardson must be perched out in mid-air beside the cliff (and when Richard jumps, the camera follows him all the way down). The sunsets ooze fiery colors, with the yacht in black silhouette in the foreground. 

This must have been an extremely rigorous shoot for all involved, and Kormákur has maintained remarkable control over the images. Shots match, even as they’re filming out in open ocean: the weather, the sky, the height and dip of the waves in any given sequence, all maintain consistency. The storm, when it finally comes, is an extraordinary piece of filmmaking and effects. In an interview when her book came out, Tami Ashcraft was asked about whether or not the storm depicted in the film adaptation of “ The Perfect Storm ” was an accurate depiction of what such a storm is like. She replied, “There wasn’t enough spray and the wall of water was a little hokey.” There’s nothing hokey about the storm in “Adrift” ( Dadi Einarsson  supervised the visual effects). As the yacht surfs up the side of a mountain of water, the entire background of the screen is filled with heaving ocean. There’s no sky in sight, just flailing waves the size of three-story buildings. And they clearly listened to Ashcraft, because the air is filled with spray, splashing against the camera. It’s chaos. The entire scene is a screaming nightmare come to life. 

There’s minimal chemistry between the two actors, who aren’t given much to go on in terms of who these characters are. It’s hard to “buy into” the Great Love they’re “selling” here. But there’s a fascination in stories like these, stories like “ Touching the Void ” or “And I Alone Survived.” What human beings will do to survive, facing a Mother Nature who seems to have a vested interest in killing them, is, yes, awe-inspiring. It makes you think, “How would I face such challenges? Would I be as resourceful as Tami? Or would I give up?”

Sheila O'Malley

Sheila O’Malley received a BFA in Theatre from the University of Rhode Island and a Master’s in Acting from the Actors Studio MFA Program. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

• Grace Palmer as Deb
• Elizabeth Hawthorne as Christine
• Luna Campbell as Tahitian Paddler
• Shailene Woodley as Tami Oldham
• Jeffrey Thomas as Peter
• Sam Claflin as Richard Sharp
• Aaron Kandell
• David Branson Smith
• Jordan Kandell
• Baltasar Kormákur
• John Gilbert

Director of Photography

• Robert Richardson
• Volker Bertelmann

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Open Water 2: Adrift

Cast & crew.

Susan May Pratt

Richard Speight Jr.

Niklaus Lange

Cameron Richardson

• Average 4.4

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© 2006 Orange Pictures/ Shotgun Pictures/ Peter Rommel Productions/ Universum Film

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Review: Shailene Woodley’s performance powers the evasive shipwreck-survival drama ‘Adrift’

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The opening moments of “Adrift” announce that we are watching “a true story,” which should by rights permit me to discuss a few matters freely. Recorded facts — even when they concern people who are not especially well-known — cannot really be spoiled, and any good movie that claims history as inspiration should be able to withstand even the most detailed of plot summaries.

Certainly it gives away nothing to note that this lovers-in-peril drama was adapted from Tami Oldham Ashcraft’s 2002 memoir about how she and her fiancé, Richard Sharp, set sail on a 4,000-mile journey from Tahiti to San Diego, only to find themselves in the path of a devastating Pacific hurricane.

Yet having seen the movie, which compresses a traumatic 41-day ordeal into a swift, economical 96 minutes, my instinct is to veer toward caution. Not because the details of Oldham Ashcraft and Sharp’s ill-fated 1983 voyage are unknown but because “Adrift” — the latest in a string of visually persuasive, dramatically spotty survival pictures directed by Baltasar Kormákur (“Everest,” “The Deep”) — has twisted a few of those details in service of its own clever narrative agenda.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this. A biographical drama should be judged by a higher standard than strict historical accuracy, and some of “Adrift’s” liberties are canny and effective. The movie opens after the hurricane has already come and gone, leaving a dazed, injured Tami (Shailene Woodley) to sift through the partial wreckage of the yacht. We share in her disorientation as she climbs her way to the deck, calling out frantically for Richard (Sam Claflin), and finds that the storm has severely damaged the boat and blown it far off-course.

Cue the first of several flashbacks to happier days. We see Tami, a twentysomething wanderer from California, arriving in Tahiti, supporting herself with odd jobs cleaning and repairing boats. She quickly meets and falls for Richard, a sweet, funny and similarly free-spirited English sailor in his mid-30s. The two bond above and below deck, dreaming about their future travels together and swapping troubled family histories. The title of “Adrift” might refer to an emotional state as well as a physical one, shared by two young people who find in each other a sudden antidote to years of aimless, free-spirited living.

There’s an authentic poignancy to Tami and Richard’s connection, buoyed by the actors’ sweet, unforced chemistry. As seen in her best performances (in “The Descendants,” “The Spectacular Now” and the HBO miniseries “Big Little Lies”), Woodley has a gift for conjoining inner strength and vulnerability until the two are all but indistinguishable. Her flinty American prickliness finds both a loving embrace and a gentle foil in Claflin’s soft eyes and mellow, British-accented charm.

It’s the primacy of that bond that keeps both Tami and the movie going even after disaster strikes and the long, arduous work of survival begins. Hours after the storm passes, Tami is relieved to see Richard alive but unconscious and seriously wounded. It thus falls to Tami, less experienced but no slouch in the sailing department, to get them back on course, using little more than a sextant. Water and rations are scarce; after the two gorge themselves on a precious jar of peanut butter, Tami, a vegetarian, is forced to make do with tinned sardines and a few unfairly maligned cans of Spam.

The conventions of the lost-at-sea genre are all here and accounted for: the grim dressing and redressing of wounds, the external manifestations of constant hunger, thirst and exposure to sunlight, the despairing on-screen markers of time slowly but surely passing (“5 days adrift … 8 days adrift”). What the movie lacks is the patience and slowly enveloping power of a drama like “All Is Lost” (2013), which cast a shipwrecked Robert Redford in a one-man existential procedural. In contrast with that movie’s present-tense linearity, “Adrift” keeps doubling back on itself, shuttling convulsively between time frames.

The benefits of this accordion-like structure are obvious, particularly from a screenwriter’s perspective. (The script was written by Aaron Kandell, Jordan Kandell and David Branson Smith.) A scrap of dialogue can bring back a flood of relevant memories; an image of the present can trigger an elegant transition to the past. The details of how Richard and Tami decided to embark on their crazy expedition in the first place snap intriguingly into place like puzzle pieces. The storm itself provides a hell of a climax, an impressive demonstration of how the most restrained visual effects can also be the most terrifying.

But most of all, perhaps, the rapid-cutting structure provides us with regular bursts of relief, steady distractions from the horrors of long-term deprivation — a relief that Oldham Ashcraft and Sharp, of course, were cruelly denied.

It’s easy, maybe too easy, to watch “Adrift,” because the filmmakers keeps letting their audience off the hook. What seems at first like an ingenious and surprising dramatic strategy feels, by the end, like an evasion on the movie’s part, a refusal to grant its subject the unflinching honesty it deserves. A true story it may be, but no one should mistake it for a truthful one.

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Rating: PG-13, for injury images, peril, language, brief drug use, partial nudity and thematic elements

Running time: 1 hour, 36 minutes

Playing: In general release

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Justin Chang was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2016 to 2024. He won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in criticism for work published in 2023. Chang is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.

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