Row (2025) (REVIEW) | Projector Shorts | That sinking feeling... - video Dailymotion

Film Brain

Film Brain reviews this British thriller about a rowing world record attempt that takes a mysterious dark turn, but it gets all lost at sea, unfortunately.

Transcript

00:00Not long into British thriller Roe, I started to get that unfortunate sinking feeling.

00:05Bella Dane washes up on the shores of the Orkney Islands from a blood-stained boat,

00:09the sole survivor of a botched transatlantic world record attempt trying to row between

00:14New Finland and Ireland that ended off course and in tragedy.

00:18But what really happened on the boat?

00:20The directorial debut of Matthew LoSaso, who co-wrote the script,

00:24Roe starts with a good hook, but the flashback structure is the first issue with the film.

00:30The movie is constantly intercutting between the events on the boat,

00:32to Dane recuperating as a detective tries to figure out the mystery,

00:36but all this does is undermine the flow,

00:38with no attempt to try and play with the idea of the narrative being potentially unreliable.

00:43The investigative storyline adds little other than some stylish transitions

00:47and grossly overinflate the running time to two hours,

00:50which is very overlong for a film mostly set in a single location,

00:54with four main actors, with Sophie Skelton, Akshay Karner,

00:58and co-writer Nick Skougan playing the doomed fellow rowers.

01:02It would have been far better had we stuck with the claustrophobia and isolation on the boat,

01:06not least of which because they clearly shot out on sea,

01:09which is arduous for any production, let alone on a tiny budget.

01:13It looks almost as grueling to make as it is for the characters,

01:16and that moody intensity of a damned voyage is amplified by a score that chants the title like a battle cry.

01:23ROW! ROW! ROW!

01:27But it's the script especially that lets the whole thing down.

01:31Everything that could go wrong on a journey does, from faulty electronics to dwindling supplies,

01:36and that isn't helped by the characters making stupid, irrational decisions just to make things worse.

01:41It quickly falls into repetitive arguing and soap opera dynamics,

01:45with Skougan being a mysterious last-minute replacement who may have killed his girlfriend,

01:51particularly a scene where he becomes delirious with a fever and threatens everyone with a knife,

01:56which is just plain silly.

01:58Unfortunately, ROW struggles to keep its head above water even by the halfway mark,

02:03and the denouement with a final reveal is a disappointing shrug.

02:07ROW!

02:09ROW!

02:11ROW!

02:13ROW!

02:15ROW!

02:17ROW!

02:19ROW!

Row (2025) (REVIEW) | Projector Shorts | That sinking feeling...

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