Matt Losasso’s Row (2025) centres around a group of rowers hoping to break a trans-Atlantic world record. It tracks their journey as they face challenges every step of the way. Still, Losasso tells this story through the eyes of one of the rowers who was stranded on an island. She is said to be the only one who survived the journey. So, within the first few moments, the film makes it clear that it’s not a usual inspirational tale akin to Annette Bening’s ‘Nyad’ or Daisy Ridley’s ‘Young Woman and the Sea’. Instead, it’s about a doomed mission, since only one of them has seemingly survived to tell the tale. That’s why it’s inherently a brooding mystery witnessed through the eyes of someone who might be an unreliable narrator.
Despite those narrative possibilities, ‘Row’ leans more into being a white-knuckled thriller about a failed mission than a mystery about the woman’s unreliable memory. It presents the events simply through her point of view without playing around with the notion that she might be lying. If it had chosen to explore the latter route, it could have found a more compelling genre mash-up, irrespective of the survivor’s guilt or innocence. The very fact that we can’t trust what we’re being told could have been a fodder for its drama. Instead, the film merely becomes one about a botched mission that may have been doomed from the moment anyone stepped on the boat.
With that premise, you get the usual tropes related to similar survival thrillers about a dysfunctional group of people realizing the truth about their inherent dysfunction only when it’s a little too late. It’s the kind of drama that we have seen plenty of times, if not on a rowing boat, then in another setting — be it an airplane, a cruise ship, or else. As a result, the film is about these people slowly coming to terms with their probable fate and doing their best to find a way out of it. At the same time, it’s also about them losing trust in the same people they were hoping to count on. That leads to disillusionment, which in turn leads people to turn against each other, driven by their individualistic notions over collective ones.
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The script largely explores a similar disintegration of sorts, which often leads to a to-each-their-own mindset. It churns out its dramatic moments through turmoil stemming from this mentality, which comes in odds with their situation, where these teammates can’t always be self-sufficient. That leads them to conflicts, which isn’t good for someone who’s on a tiny rowing boat in the middle of nowhere. So, it has all the stakes it requires to build a tense drama, which it does, but it relies heavily on genre conventions without fleshing out the characters nearly enough. These rowing teammates don’t face any problems, whether psychological or practical, that we haven’t seen before in similar survival-laden dramas.
It’s either the depleting resources or the buried secrets that offer fodder for much of the film’s tension. The performances help the most in this case to make us sense the tension or feel a genuine emotion for any of its characters. Bella Dayne, who plays the said survivor, is the beating heart of Row’s story, guiding us through the psychological warfare on this doomed trip. Dayne portrays Megan’s disorientation, grief, and frustration through an often understated and quite earnest performance. She allows us to sympathize with Megan’s growing and crippling anguish despite her restrained act.
Akshay Khanna offers another standout performance as Daniel, Megan’s short-tempered rowing companion who can’t look past his initial goals. He also becomes a way for the film to analyze how the status quo affects people, no matter where they go. However, the film doesn’t dive into these core themes. Instead, it fleetingly mentions them and merely uses them to build its conventional drama. It also doesn’t flesh out these characters enough, which makes it difficult to believe that they would willingly get on such a boat without proper due diligence.
The script does address their motivations for this undertaking, but they are far from convincing in their reasoning. So, while intrigue is core to building a mystery, it’s not enough for the film’s nearly two-hour runtime. It’s unfortunate, considering the impressive performances from the cast, who are committed to their roles despite a trope-ridden script. Zoran Veljkovic’s cinematography also helps in sustaining a gloominess, while letting the performances take the centre stage. So, by the end, the film leaves you with an affecting but underwhelming drama that doesn’t linger in your mind either as a mystery or a survival thriller.
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