The Boat (2018)

The previous review on Observance made me think of another movie that I've seen recently. This is another movie that I was interested in seeing because it has an extremely minimalistic plot and I wanted to see where the director would go with it. It's also a very low budget independent film, something I had been wanting to watch more of after getting into the brilliant Astron-6 production company (which is sadly defunct now). Though I'm also convinced nothing will ever beat Father's Day (2011) as far as the entertainment:budget ratio goes.

There's not a whole lot to say about this one. It ends up being similar to what I wanted Observance to be as far as seeing how far you can take an extremely minimalist plot and setting goes: The protagonist finds an abandoned sailboat while fishing, boards it to investigate, and ends up being stuck on it. Weird things then begin to ensue. The protagonist spends a good chunk of the movie being trapped in a bathroom on the boat, which sounds kind of dumb, but to the movie's credit, it does manage to have enough happen for it to be pretty tense. There are also moments like when the protagonist is forced to fall asleep submerged up to his neck in water that do a very good job of exploring just how awful the situation in the movie could be in the real world.

If I had anything to complain about, it'd be that the movie is almost too sparse. Throughout the movie, it's clear that there's something off about the boat that the protagonist is trapped on, but there's not even a hint as to what that might be. Most of the time I think it's a good thing in a horror movie plot to keep the horror as unseen and vague as possible, but there was so little to latch onto in this that I started to feel like the boat itself was being personified. Which honestly works against the idea of keeping the horror unseen and unknown.

All in all I think the director does pretty much everything you can with this premise and does it competently on a very low budget, and the movie is also short, so I would say it's probably worth a watch.

Created: 2022-10-14 Fri 15:09

Last updated: 2024-03-05 Tue 22:57