Seven years after its release, Adrift (2018) remains one of the most quietly devastating survival stories of the last decade. Based on a harrowing true story, the film took audiences far from land and deep into the emotional currents of love, endurance, and grief — all while adrift in the vast, unforgiving Pacific Ocean.
Directed by Baltasar Kormákur, the film starred Shailene Woodley in what many critics still consider her most powerful performance to date. As the film enjoys a resurgence in streaming popularity and is being studied in modern survival cinema retrospectives, it’s clear Adrift has only grown more appreciated with time.
Adrift is based on the real-life ordeal of Tami Oldham Ashcraft, who, in 1983, found herself stranded alone at sea after a Category 4 hurricane crippled the sailboat she and her fiancé, Richard Sharp, were delivering from Tahiti to San Diego.
The film begins with chaos — Tami (Woodley) wakes up bloodied, confused, and alone on a half-destroyed yacht. Richard (played by Sam Claflin) is nowhere to be found. From there, the film unfolds in two parallel narratives: one tracing their idyllic, sun-drenched romance before the storm, and the other following Tami’s excruciating journey to survive 41 days alone, rationing supplies and navigating across 1,500 miles of open ocean.
The emotional twist in the final act still leaves first-time viewers breathless — a cinematic gut punch that redefines everything that came before it.
Known primarily for her work in The Fault in Our Stars and Divergent, Shailene Woodley took a major creative risk with Adrift. She not only starred in the film, but also produced it, throwing herself into a physically and emotionally punishing role.
Woodley lost significant weight for the part, performed many of the stunts herself, and endured grueling open-ocean shoots in Fiji. Her performance — equal parts raw vulnerability and fierce resilience — earned her critical acclaim, though she was surprisingly overlooked during awards season.
Today, in retrospectives and film studies courses, Adrift is often held up as a standout in the survival drama genre, with Woodley’s portrayal now viewed as one of the decade’s most underappreciated performances.
What made Adrift unique was its refusal to separate the emotional from the physical. Unlike other survival films that focus solely on the mechanics of staying alive, Adrift is also a love story — one that examines how memory, grief, and hope are as necessary to survival as food or water.
The shifting timelines between past and present may have been divisive at the time of release, but in hindsight, they gave the story a layered emotional weight that few survival dramas manage.
With the increasing popularity of minimalist survival stories in recent years, Adrift is now considered a modern classic in the genre. It’s a story about how love can endure the impossible, how strength often comes in silence, and how the sea — vast and cruel — can still be a place of deep, heartbreaking beauty
