Sam Neill x 3: ‘Dead Calm,’ ‘The Piano,’ ‘In the Mouth of Madness’

Sam Neill was an honest-to-goodness movie star. An A-lister. A bankable leading man across all genres for four decades plus. In recent years, he’d grown beloved on social media, too, for his ingratiating bite-sized videos about life on the farm, whether he was introducing animal friends with celebrity names or sharing an emotional moment with a sunflower. He was, by some margin, the most treasured of the notable figures who died last weekend, and yet it’s worth looking past the warm feelings that people had for him personally to see his unusual durability as a genuine marquee name. Though obviously a dashing and charismatic figure, with gently feathered hair and piercing blue eyes, he was the rare self-effacing star, a fundamentally modest man who just kept on appearing in some of the biggest movies and TV shows of his time, often as a leading man and occasionally a bit deeper down the cast list. 

It was hard for me to figure out how to eulogize him properly, given the sheer number of significant performances he gave, from blockbusters like the Jurassic Park movies and The Hunt for Red October to international productions like Possession and Until the End of the World to later, quirkier independent turns in gems like Rams and Hunt for the Wilderpeople. So instead I’ve chosen a sample of three films that immediately popped into my mind when the sad news of Neill’s passing broke. They’re not necessarily his best films—though one most certainly is—but they are each memorable benchmarks in a distinguished career. 

Dead Calm (1989) 

When you work as a video store clerk—especially at a treasured ma-and-pa operation like Video Library in Athens, Georgia—people are going to ask you for recommendations. Obviously these conversations can get pretty granular when they’re looking for, say, the next Hong Kong action movie to watch after Drunken Master 2 or where to start with David Cronenberg’s work pre-Videodrome. (My answers for those would be Supercop and The Brood, respectively.) But more often, the request would be extremely vague, which we’d usually interpret as: “Please give me something entertaining to watch that I don’t already know about.” And so, for us, that meant a movie that wasn’t a big studio tentpole or challenging arthouse fare, and was a modest piece of craftsmanship that was broadly pleasing and held up well on VHS. 

The default choice for us at Video Library was Diggstown, the wonderful James Woods/Bruce Dern/Louis Gossett Jr. sports comedy from 1992 about con artists squaring off in a boxing contest. A popular second pick, however, was Dead Calm, a drum-tight 1989 thriller from Australia that owes more than a little to Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water, but features three rising stars and has a nice, nasty Ozsploitation bite to it. To put it in Letterboxd-ese, it’s a quintessential “five-star three-star movie,” an unpretentious good time that customers usually returned with a request to see more movies under vague criteria, which would probably be something along the lines of Tremors or Breakdown. There are no barriers to access a movie like Dead Calm, which offers just a scant bit of backstory before barreling forward with a desperate situation on the high seas involving a grieving couple and a desperate stranger they’re unfortunate enough to help.