It’s great to once again watch and review a good Shailene Woodley film. The actress possesses remarkable talent, yet since late 2014 has been tangled in a web of bad films (mostly Divergent sequels) where such talent is stifled by shoddy scripts and stories. Adrift breaks free from the web, giving Woodley her first good film in nearly four years.
Adrift’s plot tells the incredible true story (that has clearly been tampered with to be more film-friendly) of a sailing couple who get caught at sea in a massive storm and do their best to survive. The most standout aspect to Adrift is its style of showcasing past and present events—cutting between current events and flashbacks of how the couple got into such a disastrous situation (all the while fleshing out its couple’s relationship and background). The style has been done before, yet what makes Adrift’s variant unique is how it shifts in genre. While the flashback sequences tell a typical love story, the current events tell a standard survival drama. If these stories were told alone, or if the film had told them in a linear manner, the result would be unremarkable and just another dime a dozen Hollywood tale. Yet by taking these two tonal differing stories and switching between them in an unorthodox manner, Adrift is able to keep its story fresh.
The love story, for example, is spliced into its key components—both the significant growth points for the couple and the little moments that give color to their relationship. These scenes are broken up by the survival drama scenes in an almost jarring fashion, but one that ultimately works. The style lets me come to know and care for the couple’s relationship in a way that bypasses tediousness. The largely somber survival sections (little tongue twister) are broken up with the upbeat romantic escapades, preventing the story from becoming overly dismal. The style also allows the middle point of the story’s narrative—the couple facing the storm's roughest point—to effectively work as the film’s climax.
Adrift’s style succeeds in making what would have been a stale narrative engaging and dynamic. Woodley delivers a good performance here—not one of her best, but far from her worst—with a script that complements her rather than hinders. Adrift is far from anything groundbreaking, but it avoids mediocrity through its stylistic choices and is the right step in direction for Woodley’s career.