Three best friends are stuck on a boat. The engine is dead and no other boats are passing by to rescue them. There is no food or water on board. They have no tools to try and catch fish, and it hasn’t rained for days. The more time passes, the more the situation goes from bad to worse.
This is the setup for Harpoon, the latest feature from writer/director Rob Grant, currently making the festival rounds. Turbo Kid’s Munro Chambers plays Jonah, recently orphaned and whose life is a mess; Christopher Gray (of The Mist TV series) is Richard, his spoiled rich kid best friend and owner of the boat on which the trio finds themselves stranded; Emily Tyra plays Sasha, the girl who comes between them both. The black comedy thriller plays out more or less as a three-person chamber drama, with occasional wry narration (courtesy of Brett Gelman) commenting on the proceedings with a dispassionate chill. Between the vastness of the ocean and the fatalism of the universe, the problems of three people don’t amount to a hill of beans.
After getting off to a shaky start – the opening moments are crammed with ‘90s-era film student flourishes like flashback cutaways designed to look like 16mm black and white home movies – Harpoon eventually finds its footing once things begin to go wrong. The awfulness of the characters makes them hard to invest in early on, until we realize that their awfulness is the point. These aren’t people we’re meant to root for so much as ants we’re meant to observe frying under a magnifying glass, and the longer Harpoon goes on, the more it leans into this dynamic, the more writer/director Grant is able to let loose with his more sadistic tendencies and make a movie that’s really bleak and really, really nasty.
Nasty, of course, isn’t everyone’s bag, and the lack of a real moral center may put some audiences off something like Harpoon. As someone who found Munro Chambers endlessly likable as the title character in Turbo Kid, I’ll admit to having a hard time watching him suffer. But suffering is the name of the game here, and the movie’s greatest strength is in continuing to turn the screws on its trio until they can’t be unturned without spilling a good deal of blood. Like a wound that’s infected and beginning to rot, so, too, do the friendships at the center of Harpoon. Unlike most arguments, though, this isn’t going to be settled with just some heated words. The movie’s not called Harpoon for nothing.
