‘Dead Calm’ On HBO: Watch Nicole Kidman Become A Star in This Bonkers Thriller

Nicole Kidman. You know who she is. She’s the Aussie actress who can flit from vamp to victim in the space of a second. She rose to movie star status in the ’90s when she married Tom Cruise and soon proved herself as one of the most tremendous artists of her generation. Oh, you might know her as Celeste on Big Little Lies. (That wig!)
Nicole Kidman is an icon, and as such, there are a million ways we could honor her on her birthday. So lets revisit the role that pushed her onto the world stage in the first place: Rae Ingram in Dead Calm.
Dead Calm is a 1989 thriller directed by Philip Noyce (with a little bit of help from co-producer George Miller). The film follows a couple at sea who find themselves the target of a madman’s caprice. Sam Neill stars as the heroic husband, a sea captain named John Ingram, and Billy Zane is Hughie Warner, the castaway who is revealed to be a psychopath. And Nicole Kidman is Rae, a woman who rediscovers her aching need to survive in the face of insurmountable odds.

The first time we see Kidman in the film, she’s convulsing on a hospital table. Doctors are forcing her eyes open against her will. It’s an eerie moment that recalls A Clockwork Orange and ntroduces us to the idea that Rae Ingram has been through literal torture. To prove this, we immediately flashback to the macabre moment when she and her little boy find themselves in a terrible car accident. We see the little boy flung from the car, like a projectile shot through the windshield. It’s horrifying. So much so that the film immediately becomes about the horror of Rae’s grief. When the film shifts its focus to Rae and John’s sailing trip on the calm Pacific seas, we understand that she is here to be literally emotionally adrift. She swims in the day, and she has night terrors at night. Rae Ingram is a woman who maintains a placid exterior, all while she is unraveling inside.

But Dead Calm isn’t merely about one woman’s psychological journey. It’s a bonkers thriller about a husband and wife who have to resort to every option imaginable to save themselves from a murderer. Rae’s heroism hinges on her ability to trick Hughie into believing that she is his ally, and not his adversary.

What’s extraordinary about Kidman’s performance in Dead Calm is that it’s not sophomoric in the slightest. Nicole Kidman emerges as a force on the screen, fully formed, like Athena from Zeus’s skull. She is the beguiling Renaissance beauty, all porcelain skin and romantic tendrils of red hair. Zane’s character Hughie even comments on the angles of Kidman’s character’s face, and how they evoke fine art. But Nicole Kidman has never, ever been one of those silent stone muses you see suspended in a gallery. She is not just a flesh and blood woman, but a tremendous artist. What Kidman shows us as early as 1989 is that she is an exquisite technical actress, genius at peeling back the layers of a psyche and patching them back together again.
I’ve heard Nicole Kidman praised as an ice queen for decades, but Dead Calm shows that her real talent doesn’t lie in suppressing emotions as much as showing the effort spent on acting as though everything’s fine inside. She’s a master at depicting the strategic act that women put on everyday: to look like a force of calm even as we’re screaming inside.

(PS: Dead Calm is about an hour and a half long and is available to stream on HBO this month. Just saying.)

Where to Stream Dead Calm