Plot
A honeymooning couple, John and Rae Ingram, rescue a young man, Hughie, from a sinking boat who claims to have lost his companions to food poisoning. When John goes to inspect the sinking boat, he discovers the captain, Russ, and another woman, Mrs. Warriner, alive and begging for help. Discovering that John has left, Hughie panics, takes Rae hostage, and begins driving her boat away from the sinking ship.
On board the sinking ship, John learns that Hughie and Mrs. Warriner and Russ and his wife, Mrs. Bellows, were vacationing when Hughie suffered an agoraphobic reaction while diving with Mrs. Bellows and accidentally killed her trying to climb onto her shoulders. The realization of what he'd done resulted in Hughie suffering a psychotic break. Mrs. Warriner further tells John that Hughie, though a gifted artist, has the mind of a child, his emotional growth having been stunted by his overbearing father and a codependent relationship with an inappropriately affectionate mother. On board the Ingram's boat, Rae is able to surmise this herself from Hughie's behavior and assumes the role of a caring mother figure in order to lull him into a false sense of security, while preparing to kill him with a shotgun John has stashed in their room.
Ultimately, John and Russ are able to sufficiently repair their boat and rendezvous with Hughie and Rae. When everyone is reunited, Hughie suffers a flashback and sees Russ as his father and knocks him overboard. Hughie suffers a panic attack in the water and seizes up, and drags Russ below water where they both drown.
John gives a sympathetic psychological analysis of Hughie as he, Rae, and Mrs. Warriner see that a new wind has come in that will take them all home.
Read more about this topic: Dead Calm
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“Ends in themselves, my letters plot no change;
They carry nothing dutiable; they won’t
Aspire, astound, establish or estrange.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)