10 great shipwreck films

As a narrative device, shipwrecks have an anchored position in fiction because of how frequent the danger of them used to be. For as long as boats have been crossing oceans, passengers and sailors have been terrified of being swept into harsh, unknown waters, perpetually lost at sea, and subject to a watery grave. It’s an anxiety born from the real, uncontrollable elements that faced unprepared and unsophisticated vessels for centuries. 

Shipwrecks are not a thing of the past, but you’re more likely to encounter them nowadays in fiction – and a lot of modern-age art approaches the shipwreck in a classically minded, somewhat romanticised way, adapting novels, plays and real-life disasters to mine the shipwreck’s potential for tension, pathos and even satire.

Where there’s danger, there’s also adventure, and stories about shipwreck often lead to characters being washed ashore on new, undiscovered sands where fantasies of self-fulfilment and survival can be realised. This type of story is at the centre of Kensuke’s Kingdom, an animated adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s novel in which a storm throws a young boy, Michael (Aaron MacGregor), and his dog overboard from the family sailing yacht, stranding him on an island only inhabited by animals and a WWII Japanese naval medic Kensuke (Ken Watanabe). 

The linguistic barriers between Michael and Kensuke change with each day spent in each other’s company, with their shared mission of island survival evolving into a moving creed of cohabitation. To herald Kensuke’s Kingdom’s release, here are 10 seaworthy films featuring shipwrecks from the past 80 years.

Kensuke’s Kingdom, backed by the BFI Filmmaking Fund with National Lottery money, is in cinemas now.

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

When you need to make the open sea claustrophobic, you better get a director as sharp and intuitive as Alfred Hitchcock – admittedly, few meet that absurdly high bar. Ever the master of suspense, Hitchcock mines the aftermath of a sunk Allied passenger vessel for all the cross-cultural and class-stratified tension he can, containing in a lifeboat for the whole runtime naval crewmen, a snappy columnist, a Black steward and a German U-boat captain, among others. 

While criticism has consistently been thrown at Hitchcock and screenwriter Jo Swerling for the one-dimensional portrayal of the African-American character Joe Spencer (including by original writer John Steinbeck and the NAACP upon the film’s release), audiences over the years have grown more appreciative of the complicated and sensitive Nazi seaman since the character’s divisive initial reception. It makes for an unsteady, sometimes queasy slip into dehydrated paranoia, a key look at the immediate disorientation of shipwreck survival. 

Director: Luis Buñuel

One of the less surreal works by Luis Buñuel, but in no way less visually dazzling, this adaptation of Daniel Defoe’s adventure tale – often considered the first novel in the English language – was a huge hit in both the US and Mexico, with Buñuel shooting English and Spanish language versions for each market. 

In Buñuel’s swift and pacy version of the prototypical shipwreck story, Englishman Crusoe (an Academy Award-nominated Dan O’Herlihy) is stranded on a deserted island in the mid-1600s, and briskly sets up his own mini-haven complete with shelter, sustenance and livestock, with only brief descents into isolation-induced mania. Buñuel interpreted Defoe’s fantasy of British imperialism replicating itself on an individual level as a tale of companionship rescuing even the most abandoned souls. Even though the racist politics of Defoe’s text are replicated across the film, Jaime Fernández’s expressive, charismatic performance as Crusoe’s manservant Friday shines as brightly as the crisp, bright Pathé Color palette. 

Director: Lewis Gilbert

The third filmed version of Peter Pan playwright J.M. Barrie’s stage play of the same name, this South Seas comedy pitches a traditionalist butler Crichton (Kenneth More) as the only capable hand when he and the earl (Cecil Parker) he serves are marooned on an uninhabited island following a tremendous storm at sea. After setting up the earl’s keenness for a more egalitarian relationship with his family’s servants (which Crichton stiffly resists), his hypocrisy is revealed post-shipwreck, as the full extent of his incompetence and reliance on servant labour becomes clear. 

As the island society adapts over time, Crichton’s authority becomes more centralised and more amusing, as his strictness and warmth make aristocrats increasingly fawn over him. The contrast between the Cockney maid Eliza (Diane Cilento) and the earl’s mannered daughters, especially as an island romance storyline develops, feels like a precursor to the charged and comic sexual dynamics of Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness.

Director: Roy Ward Baker

A stately and dignified rendition of RMS Titanic’s legendary maiden voyage sinking, A Night to Remember remains the most careful depiction of the disaster, its historical accuracy deemed higher than the epic melodrama of James Cameron’s version. The looming size of Titanic (1997) can’t undermine just how scrupulous Roy Ward Baker’s docudrama is; the Edwardian-era industrial hubris that defined the disaster is painstakingly realised across class boundaries and tilting decks, in something closely resembling real time. (The ship took just over two and a half hours to sink; in Baker’s film, the collision happens with 90 minutes remaining.) 

It’s the clipped, trembling resolve of crew and passengers that brings the full scope of the tragedy to the surface, with memorable performances from Kenneth More, Tucker McGuire and Frank Lawton as real survivors that ran the gamut of courage in the face of certain death. ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’ has never been performed so stirringly as it is here.

Director: Ronald Neame

Perhaps the crowning achievement of the 1970s disaster film craze, this survival thriller – which tracks a band of passengers fighting to escape a completely upturned luxury liner – may stretch credulity but it ties the stomach in knots. 

Following his Oscar winning breakthrough in The French Connection, Gene Hackman emerges as the lead playing a level-headed pastor who corals an unlikely group through the damaged innards of the upside-down ship. There’s a blunt physicality to the setpieces in the film, and seeing bodies manoeuvre the inverted dimensions of the dining rooms and gangways adds a type of rugged tension that complex pyrotechnics or elaborate CG can’t replicate. The scale of The Poseidon Adventure is clear in every scene, even when watched today, and the hot tempers and panicked spirals of the core characters are vital to sell the story’s urgent catastrophe.

Director: Derek Jarman

For his third feature, Derek Jarman was drawn to the central, transformative theme of forgiveness in William Shakespeare’s final play. Within the walls of Stoneleigh Abbey in Warwickshire, he shot one of the most evocative and arresting adaptations of the Bard’s work. Prospero (Heathcote Williams) sits upon an empty throne on his magic island, and his fairy servant Ariel (Karl Johnson) conjures a terrible storm to wreck a Neopolitan ship carrying the King of Naples, Prospero’s brother (Peter Bull), so the skilled magician can confront his estranged brother for having him banished. 

The ensemble of performances range from theatrically comic (such as Jack Birkett as Caliban) to understated and affecting (singer Toyah Wilcox as Miranda), and together with lush production design and a delicate, strange atmosphere, Jarman’s film perfectly captures the dreamlike and amusing tone of Shakespeare’s self-aware swansong. He gives the final act the poignant and transcendent climax any dramatisation of The Tempest deserves.

Director: Alvin Rakoff

A wave of 70s genre films about the Third Reich, their unanswered crimes and fictitious revival plots is probably the reason why this British-Canadian ghost ship chiller is set on a haunted Nazi torture vessel. But while Death Ship lacks the comparative polish of The Odessa File (1974) or The Boys from Brazil (1978), Alvin Rakoff’s film uses its single major location to build a sense of helplessness and isolation for survivors of a shipping collision who take refuge on the mysterious craft.

The repeated visual motif of the ship’s pumping hydraulic engine intensifies the spectral presence of wartime horror, and helps sell the modest production’s ambition to create a living, stalking vessel. Death Ship was not a money-maker on initial release, but has since gained a decent following for its straight-faced execution of a ludicrous premise.

Director: J.C. Chandor

Before he turned towards more commercially dependable ventures, indie director J.C. Chandor made waves with a string of lower budgeted films revolving around deeply human crises. All Is Lost is a dialogue-free film derived from a 31-page shooting script about a lone sailor (Robert Redford) battling a storm in the Indian Ocean and almost succumbing to the perilous depths. 

The results might not have worked so well but for the presence of Redford, the old-school icon, now marked by age, who we watch struggle and flail against the elements. He provides the firm shoulders to carry Chandor’s vision of how lonely, hostile but also intimate one’s relationship with nature can be. The drama of a single yachtsman in a single, sinking ship has rarely felt this visceral and incremental. Paired with the luscious chimes of Alex Ebert’s score, this searching survival drama feels like a minor modern marvel.

Director: Michael Dudok de Wit

The second dialogue-free film on this list, this animated mythical tale feels like one of the clearest blueprints for Kensuke Kingdom, but in this case, the washed ashore story boasts a collaboration with Studio Ghibli. This France-Japan co-production was the famed studio’s first non-Japanese film.

Having been shipwrecked, our nameless protagonist sets about escaping the deserted island in no time, but every time he heads out to sea, he is repelled by a great red turtle – one that soon transforms into a woman. The rest of the film unspools into a gentle, aching piece of folklore, reflecting the anguishes and regrets of life spent in harmony with the world around us, rather than trying to master it. Director Michaël Dudok de Wit was hand-picked by Miyazaki for Studio Ghibli’s first foreign animation based on the Dutchman’s textured, delicate brush stroke animation style.

Director: Ruben Östlund

This riotous, Palme d’Or winning takedown of the ugly class hierarchies that luxury service industries have internalised packs one of the most explosive shipwreck sequences put to film – and it is human orifices doing the exploding. A feuding supermodel couple (Harris Dickinson and the late Charlbi Dean) are gifted a trip on a superyacht (even though the transactional nature of their influencer status is always clear) surrounded by oligarchs and industrialists, but when the ship goes under, only a small batch of survivors survive on a deserted island, and even fewer of them know how to. 

In director Ruben Ostlünd’s hands, the charming topsy-turvy satire of The Admirable Crichton takes on darker shades in an age of late-stage capitalism and globalism, with toilet cleaner Abigail (Dolly de Leon) indulging in a righteous command on the island. But as in Robinson Crusoe, society’s ruling ideology gradually replicates itself…