This Polish thriller from Roman Polanski takes an interesting premise and turns it into an awful script and a worse movie. The actors are supposed to be attractive but are in fact ugly. Hideous, even. They look and act as if they are in a student production or a low-budget, made-for-TV movie, and much of it seems to be (at one point we can even see the railing of a boat on which the camera is filming the scene). Polanski's dialogue is affected and his shot compositions are stylized in an effort to make them evocative. The story is all over the place, which no central tension or mood on which this drama/thriller can stand. There were senseless, meandering side plots, backstories, and dialogue. The music was off the entire time; it never managed the right mood or timing.
I can see the future Polanski in this earlier piece, but only in his thoughts and ideas. The attempts are genuine conceptually, but the execution is amateurish at best. Every so often there are scenes of anxious nervousness, of waiting in suspense, but they are few and far between in this otherwise drab and pointless film. The last 20 minutes or so were actually quite exciting, with a dramatic and unexpected turn of events. Also, the story of the seaman who jumped on broken glass is a good bookend for the morality tale of the movie (male posturing and oneupmanship). It was not what I expected going in, but it wasn't all bad. I had high hopes knowing what Polanski is capable of, but he does not achieve any of that greatness in this movie. As I said before with House of Games, Criterion does make mistakes. Although not quite the disaster that House of Games was, this movie is still one of those mistakes.IMDb link: http://imdb.com/title/tt0056291/