Film

Deep Water (2006)

Director: Louise Osmond, Jerry Rothwell

Movie review

From Time Out Chicago

The story of Donald Crowhurst must make adventure/disaster writers like Jon Krakauer salivate. In 1968, London’s Sunday Times set a challenge: Could a sailor circle the globe alone nonstop? Eight of the nine people who entered were famous in yachting circles. And then there was Crowhurst, a mechanical engineer and amateur sailor who somehow got the financial backing to build a boat. Not, as it turned out, a very good boat; prone to leaks and other woes, his vessel was doomed to fail and would probably sink, a fact that became clear within a week of setting off.

Facing bankrupcy if he quit, Crowhurst began perpetrating a hoax. He sent a few false radio reports of his progress, then dropped into radio silence. His plan was to hang around the Atlantic off South America until the other racers came full circle, and then sail in quietly with the pack. But the pressure and the loneliness literally drove him mad. (In some of his last log entries he writes about being “a second generation celestial being.”)

Osmond and Rothwell offer an elegant balancing of interviews, archival footage, and Crowhurst’s own 16mm film and audio tape. With a story like this, you don’t need any fancy reenactments or interrogations of the documentary form. The facts are compelling enough.