SETUP
Daniel, Michelle and Christopher Press moved to the remote and treacherous Tangier Island in the middle of winter. Chris was an ambitious and hopeful fisherman who wanted nothing more than for his fishing boat to provide his son with a life of prosperity and connection to nature. He and Daniel had an unspoken bond that you could see in the moments where they worked together on Chris’s fishing boat — they were simpatico and an efficient team. The Press family was the only family on the island that hadn’t grown up there and Daniel was starting to sense that the islanders were wary of Chris’s ‘mainland ambitions’ — always going out in the morning before any of the other fishermen and always staying out longer.
INCITING INCIDENT
When the opportunity presented itself, a once legendary island fisherman named Jay pulled Daniel and Chris aside to issue them a warning about the dangers of the Atlantic in winter — a season when islanders respected the balance of life and turned the waters over to the behemoth whales that lived in them.
Only a few days later on a particularly warm morning, Chris left the house alone for a fishing haul and a Noreaster storm caught him off guard. He sent his last radio transmission at 6am and did not return.
DEBATE
Jay was responsible for the search party that ensued but failed to locate Chris. He then had to explain to Daniel and Michelle that they only searched half the island shores because in Nor’easter season they don’t search the eastern shore due to its exposure to unpredictable weather. Trying to find some consolation to share with Daniel, he gave him a pair of binoculars and told him to watch the shores for whales — that it was long believed that the beasts in the Atlantic would sometimes lead them to find lost loved ones.
Before the next storm could arrive, Michelle took the harrowing boat ride to the mainland to recruit help searching for Chris but she got caught in inclement weather on the way there and wouldn’t be able to return to the island for several days.
Daniel was monitoring the radios for any sign of Chris when he saw Jay heading out in his boat toward the eastern shore. Without hesitating, Daniel chased after him in a small dinghy. Jay told Daniel that he had seen the whales and had decided to go for a look. But now the storm had accelerated and they needed to turn back immediately. Daniel pressed him to continue just a bit further and Jay cautiously agreed, eying the storm approaching on the horizon. Before they could get far, the storm touched down and they lost their rudder, the swell blowing them 50mi down the coast to the southern tip of the island, injuring Jay with a badly broken rib.
ACT II
Marooned on the south shore of the island, Jay assessed that there were only two options ahead of them — walk the protected leeward side of the island home, or take the shorter but immensely more dangerous windward side home up the eastern shore. Daniel decided they would take the eastern shore home, knowing that if Chris wasn’t found on the western side, maybe they would find him on their route homeward. Injured and reliant on Daniel for his own survival, Jay was forced to agree.
As they moved slowly north on foot, Daniel could tell something was on Jay’s mind and Jay eventually admitted that he knew the route up the eastern coast because he and his wife had wrecked there years ago and she had died trying to get help, only for him to be rescued a few hours later.
B-STORY
Not long into the journey Daniel found a small row boat beached on the shore and made the decision for them to row the next leg and cover more ground on the now-placid water. With Jay was laid up and unable to row, Daniel saw a whale cross underneath them and nearly fell overboard trying to get a better look. Jay saved him from going over — scolding him that one brush with the cold water could mean hypothermia this time of year. In the process of saving Daniel from going overboard, Jay realized that he had worsened his own injury and he was now coughing up blood.
They returned to land to make camp and after Jay fell asleep, Daniel heard a whale-song off the coast and stepped toward the water to listen. Jay slowly woke too and told Daniel a story about the whales that had been passed down on the island — about a whale that saved a shipwrecked sailor despite the fact that the man had wrecked while on a whaling hunt. He told Daniel that he always struggled to believe the stories since the whales didn’t save him or his wife. Daniel asked Jay, why, if he was so skeptical of the story had he gone out on the water to follow the whales the day before? After Jay fell asleep, Daniel spotted something in Jay’s belongings. Chris’s fishing log was stashed in his bag - a journal of sorts that would have been kept at the marina. Opening to the most recent entry, the journal indicated that the morning of Chris’s wreck he had been setting out to a dangerous cove called Bloody Point on the eastern shore. They were only a few miles away.
MIDPOINT
The next morning, Jay woke in even more pain and found Daniel already packed into the small boat and ready to go. He told Jay that instead of rowing the shorter distance across the large cove, they would drag the boat with a rope the long way around the inside of the cove despite the rocks being inherently more dangerous there.
Later that day, not even halfway around the cove, they reached a point where they couldn’t continue on foot and were forced to get back in the boat and row. Being so close to shore now, the waves wrecked them and they both went overboard. When the two of them made it back to land without any of their gear, Jay realized they were even farther from their destination now. Then Daniel saw it, a short ways across the cove was Chris’s boat, wrecked on a treacherous body of rocks, only accessible by water or by descending a steep cliff that loomed above it.
BAD GUYS CLOSE IN
Jay pressed Daniel to turn back the way they had come and return to their camp to warm up. Daniel confessed that he had seen the journal and took them the long way around the cove to try and find Chris’s wreck — and now they could make shelter when they got there. Frustrated, Jay separated from Daniel and tried to ascend a nearby hill to scout a return path the way they had come. Daniel went after Jay, finding him collapsed and losing consciousness at the top of the hill. Jay told Daniel that if they could cross the rocky hillsides, there was a flat marshland on the other side of the cove that would lead straight home. Daniel persuaded Jay to trust him and descend the cliff to the coast to look for his dad and if they failed, they would abandon the search and take the hillsides home.
Daniel carried Jay down the hill and they found Chris’s fishing boat wrecked on the shore where the journal indicated it would be. It was a far more grizzly sight than Daniel expected, the 40-foot ocean trawler obliterated against the rocks. Daniel was ecstatic to find a small aluminum dinghy on the shore, propped up as a shelter and evidently where Chris had sheltered after the wreck. He searched for his dad frantically but found nothing.
ALL IS LOST
When he returned, he found Jay collapsed and losing consciousness, barely able to breath. Daniel bundled him up and lay him in the aluminum dinghy, sliding it halfway into the water. But before boarding the craft himself, he went back into the wrecked fishing boat one more time to look for his dad — finding a note from Chris indicating that he had broken his arm and was continuing north on foot. After coming back out, Daniel realized the dinghy had drifted away from shore with an unconscious Jay in it. He tore the fishing boat apart to find one of his dad’s old wetsuits and put it on, swimming out after Jay.
He finally caught up to the dinghy way off shore and climbed on board to find Jay unconscious but dry. They had no oar and Daniel could see a storm on the horizon now. Jay slowly opened his eyes to a noise and saw something in the water. Daniel noticed too that two whales had surrounded them. Terrified, he huddled in the bottom of the boat with Jay as the whales bumped up beneath them and rocked the small vessel. Remembering the story, he found a rope on the floor of the boat and through it over. Miraculously, the behemoth started to drag them. Daniel held onto the rope until his hands were bloodied and they had reached land.
DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL
Expecting the whale to have dragged them home, Daniel was frustrated to see that it had only dragged them a short distance down the cove. Daniel put Jay on his back and carried the man up the shore, growing fatigued with every step. On the brink of collapse, Daniel started seeing pieces of driftwood along the shore that had the words HELP and SOS carved in them. Not long after, he saw the smoke from a small fire a ways down the coast. When he arrived, he found his dad there on the ground, huddled next to the embers and unconscious, on the brink of death.
ACT III
With Jay unconscious too, he made the hard decision to leave Jay by the fire and take his dad. Carrying Chris, he pressed along the coast as fast as he could to find the shortest route home. But he slipped, dropping Chris and falling himself off a rock ledge toward the surf. At his lowest point, collapsed on the rocky shore, he decided to go back for Jay too.
DIG DEEP
Returning to the camp fire, he roped his dad to his back and then lifted Jay, carrying both of them onwards. Continuing up the coast one step at a time, Daniel was on the brink of ruin when he heard the whales off shore following along side him. He closed his eyes and focused on the sound of their blow-spouts with each of his agonizing steps.
When he opened his eyes again, the whales were gone, but the town was in the far distance. Despite having it in his sights, he was out of energy and collapsed, dropping Jay and his father and falling to the ground next to them, his father’s unconscious face right in front of his.
He heard a sound beyond and opened his eyes to see an amazing display on the water. Hundreds of yards off shore, a dozen whales broached the surface simultaneously, their whale song crying out. Beyond them, in the direction of the town, he heard a ship’s horn in the far distance.
FINALE
Daniel made the impossible decision, leaving his dad and Jay behind and scrambling to his feet. He clawed his way across the slippery rock coast, spotting a raised point of land beyond where he could signal for help. He climbed up the the rocky point, barely able to summit it and nearly slipping back down the way he had came. When he finally reached the top, he looked out beyond to see the entire fishing fleet approaching across the water beyond him. Horns erupted in unison as they spotted Daniel.
FINAL IMAGE
In the final image of the movie, we see the whale cruising through the water, broaching every so often just enough to see its back parting the waves. Daniel opened his eyes slowly, reclined on a table at the back of a rescue boat, watching the whale move through the water beside them. His mother was clutching his other hand, her hands folded in prayer. Daniel turned to see her and to see Chris on on the table next to her, his eyes open and looking back at him. Then he saw the island pastor holding Jay’s hand on a table beside Chris, she looked at Daniel with an expression that said Jay hadn’t made it.
Still in a daze, Daniel turned back toward the water to see that a whale had surfaced and was gliding along next to them. He watched it part through the now smooth Atlantic ocean alongside their boat before disappearing beneath the waves.