Lifeboat

Of all the Hitchcock movies I have left on my watchlist (25 or so), this was the one I’ve been anticipating the most and looking for the longest. It stands out, just on sheer design, from the rest of his filmography. There is no innocent man on the run. There is no murder mystery. There is no Maguffin. There is no espionage. There’s just a bunch of people adrift in the ocean in a boat. What could be done with that? Turns out, quite a fair bit. Hitchcock finds a way to make this simple dynamic constantly intriguing with simple ideas. The inevitable power struggle; the rationing of supplies; an injured person; going stir-crazy; a storm. All of these are introduced and change the dynamic. The biggest, though, is that one of the survivors is the sole survivor of the Nazi U-boat that caused the shipwreck that has everyone in the boat in the first place. Can he be trusted? He has the same goal as everyone else — not die in the middle of the ocean — but does he intend to survive through other means? Lifeboat keeps the viewer on their toes about him, never portraying him as outright good, but maybe someone who can contribute in the unusual circumstances. It’s a fine line with a person aligned with such a toxic group, but I think Lifeboat does it quite well. The atmosphere of this movie is to be commended. You wouldn’t think a movie taking place on a small boat could have much atmosphere, but this is Hitchcock we’re talking about. He manages a neat, contradictory trick of giving the movie a sense of massive space and claustrophobia. The ocean seems endless, while the boat seems like a prison cell. That dichotomy creates feelings of isolation and desperation; they’re not locked to one place, but for how much real estate is all around them, they might as well be. The direction amplifies this with a lot of shots from within the boat, putting the viewer in the boat with them, and the total absence of a score. And the tensions in the boat are smartly developed by constantly pairing them off in new ways, exploring different relationship dynamics. There are so many little details to show how the group is fracturing, as a group and as individuals, even something as simple as a hypothetical pot in a gamer of poker. There’s always a new way this movie finds to chip away at the hope and sanity of the group. The movie’s one weakness is that some characters are underdeveloped and not given nearly enough material. Alice and Joe, especially, are given the short shrift compared to others, to say nothing of Mrs. Higley. Certain dynamics are over-explored in comparison to others. But there’s also only so much time to put everyone with and against each other. I had a feeling this would be a good one, and I was not disappointed. I’ve always heard this discussed in the next level down from the classics like Psycho and Vertigo, and that’s spot on. It isn’t god-tier, but it is excellent, and after a lot of samey movies in his filmography that get hard to distinguish, this stands out, and that helps it a lot.