Row

Note: Kaleidoscope Entertainment will release Row in UK cinemas on August 29th and will be available on DVD & digital platforms from September 29th. 

“Extraordinary achievements require extraordinary sacrifice,” declares the team leader of four sailors, who hope to row 2,300 miles from Newfoundland, Canada, across the Atlantic to the UK, to break a world record. Their journey requires endless physical toil and mental precision for weeks on end. What occurs between their departure and the eventual arrival of the team’s lone survivor, malnourished and rattled from her experience, is the central mystery of Row. Told mostly in flashback, the rowing team faces various disasters—missing food, a failing power supply, and downed communications—that might be horrible coincidences or sabotage for some nefarious reason, leading to mistrust and infighting among the crew. The British thriller has notes of Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat (1944) and Phillip Noyce’s Dead Calm (1989), where a prolonged period on the rolling sea leads to emotional strain, frayed nerves, and murder. But the lingering question of what happened was less urgent to me than whether the movie could sustain my interest, which it could not.

First-time feature director Matthew Losasso and his co-writer Nick Skaugen deploy an overly familiar non-chronological structure for Row, relying on the story’s arrangement of scenes to introduce a mystery. Also serving as editor, Losasso drags the proceedings out for nearly two hours, despite a relatively thin narrative. After a brief glimpse of what’s to come—the rattled, knife-wielding protagonist and two bound bodies on the small boat, splattered with blood—the movie finds Megan (Bella Dayne) in a hospital bed on the Scottish island of Hoy, where she’s interviewed by Detective Kelly (Tam Dean Burn). The investigator has questions about what happened to her crew and, later, whether her account aligns with the evidence. Kelly cannot find any information about one rower she claims was on the boat. Lost in a wavering delirium, nightmares, and catatonia, Megan tries to remember, but her recollections are fragmented and most likely unreliable. 

Weeks earlier, when the crew departs, it’s all laughs and sailor songs at first. Daniel (Akshay Khanna) runs the team, funded by his father’s money and motivated by his need for his father’s approval. Daniel and Megan share the boat’s small space and single room in shifts with Lexi (Sophie Skelton), whose boyfriend Adam (Mark Strepan) was supposed to come along, but he broke his leg. In Adam’s place, the mysterious Mike (Nick Skaugen) joins the crew as a last-minute addition. Daniel gives rallying speeches but also makes compromises without consulting the others, such as not bringing along a water heater, because he’s desperate to break a world record. His willingness to sacrifice the crew’s comfort for personal glory escalates, as do a series of problems: debris in polluted waters jams a rudder motor, slowing them down; Mike gets seasick, and he pulls a knife on his crewmates during a hallucination; personal conflicts and betrayals become all too regular. Worse, not everyone is who they seem to be. 

Row looks and sounds like a professional piece of filmmaking, but Losasso’s order of events kept me at a distance. On the surface, cinematographer Zoran Veljkovic captures stunning imagery of deep blue Atlantic waves, luminous sunsets, and oppressive rainfall. The otherwise recessive music by Kyle Kirkpatrick sometimes employs a chilling, ancient-sounding refrain (“Row, row, row”), reminiscent of the chant of oarsmen on a Roman naval vessel, adding to the movie’s undercurrent of dread. However, the impressionistic, non-linear arrangement never quite captured my attention, partly due to its sluggish pacing. This is a check-your-watch movie, with Losasso continuously alternating between Megan in the hospital, her memories of the journey, and her nightmares over what happened. But in a miscalculation of the audience’s interest, Losasso has written a passive protagonist who doesn’t say much and isn’t engaging. And when all is revealed, it’s too little, too late. 

Marred by its humorless, dour tone, Row begins to drag well before the midpoint, introducing too many repetitive wrinkles, and not enough of them are compelling. Likewise, there are too few memorable encounters between these uninvolving characters. Khanna and Skelton’s performances stand out from the small ensemble, while Dayne performs the inert Megan well enough. Still, the proceedings and characters feel underwritten, with too much time devoted to long passages of tedium. Whereas similar films, such as All Is Lost (2013), manage to be more immersive with less dialogue and more focus on the moment-to-moment situation, Row spends too much time on empty passages, impressionistic dream imagery, and visual repetition to underscore the length of their journey. It’s never quite as urgent or absorbing as the material wants to be, so when the third act provides answers, I struggled to care. This sort of thing has been done better before, and Row does little to earn a place among the great thrillers set on the high seas.