After losing their young son in a car accident, Rae (Nicole Kidman) and John Ingram (Sam Neill) try to recuperate by sailing together in the South Pacific. When they come across a drifting yacht they find a sole survivor (Billy Zane), whose story does not quite seem to hold water.

Phillip Noyce directs Dead Calm, an Australian psychological thriller that was released back in 1989. It is a tightly wound and wonderfully suspenseful work, making use of an extremely limited cast and cleverly exploiting its setting to maximum effect. The film catapulted several of its cast and crew to Hollywood; a launch each of them well deserved. This is populist filmmaking par excellence.

The stranger, named Hughie, conspires to abandon John on the sinking yacht while absconding with Rare on John’s own vessel. This immediately splits the narrative in two: in one, Rae is left to negotiate with an increasingly unstable Hughie, while in the other John goes about trying to keep a sinking boat afloat until rescue arrives. Impressively, both plot threads simultaneously invoke claustrophobia and agoraphobia. Both are set in the cramped, dark cabins of the yachts, yet both yachts are also isolated by the ocean. There is nothing to be seen but sky and water to all horizons. Dean Semler, one of this country’s finest cinematographers, does a fantastic job of lensing it all.

Of course it helps that the film has a particularly tight screenplay. Viewers only see what is necessary for them to see. Video footage left on Hughie’s sinking boat imply something perversely awful has happened, but it is never quite made clear what it was. Meanwhile Hughie’s combination of upbeat bravado and homicidal paranoia keeps the other half of the film perpetually on its toes.

The three performances are excellent. Sam Neill’s quiet desperation rings true, as does Kidman’s combination of grim resolve and growing terror. As for Zane, it is a showy and unrealistic character that he is required to play, but he plays it well with plenty of oily, disreputable charisma.

It is not entirely perfect. While Kidman and Neill are excellent, the 20-year gap in age between them highlights a consistent problem in commercial cinema. Pairing older men with younger women always seems a tiresome trend no matter how talented the actors are.

The film is also book-ended by two sequences that unfortunately generate unintended laughs more than thrills. A prologue sequence about the death of Rae and John’s child is risibly filmed in a manner so tasteless as to become farcical. At the other end, a studio-mandated second climax is simply unconvincing and extremely silly. You can easily tell where Noyce originally ended his film. It would have been much better if Warner Bros had allowed him to keep it where it was.

That still leaves the bulk of the film to be a confident, pulpy thriller with clever plot developments, inventive use of its setting, and three strong, immensely watchable characters. Dead Calm turns 35 this year. It’s still a standout Australian film classic.