On Jan. 13, 2012, the huge Italian cruise ship Costa Concordia struck a rock just off Giglio Island, tearing a 53-metre gash in the vessel’s hull. The engine room soon flooded, cutting power to much of the ship. There were 3,229 passengers and 1,023 crew aboard. The ship listed dangerously to starboard, and evacuation, which did not begin until more than 45 minutes after the accident, took six hours. Thirty-two people died.
This documentary, directed by Italy’s Chiara Messineo, draws on interviews with survivors, cell-phone footage from the night, and translations of the ship’s black box recordings to tell the awful story.
A simple format that works
Messineo takes an “if it ain’t broke” approach, interspersing present-day talking-head interviews with video clips and some subtitled text, an immediately accessible format. Its strength lies in the emotional weight of the survivors’ testimony and the shocking immediacy of the shaky, grainy footage. “Shipwrecked” is as harrowing as any horror film. The terror of that night comes through in the archival videos and the rawness of the interviewees’ memories, whether it is the American couple recounting the panic of trying to save their young baby, the ship’s hotel manager describing how he ended up in a flooded restaurant where he blacked out, the Italian passenger whose mother went missing in the chaotic dash for the lifeboats, or the British dancer whose dream job turned to horror as her managers demanded the troupe carry on even after it was clear to everyone that something was very wrong.
Building toward the escape
Messineo paces the story expertly, switching between accounts as she builds toward the horrifying scramble to escape the doomed ship. One of the most maddening threads is the lack of leadership from the ship’s captain, Francesco Schettino, whose panicked response and apparent desire to protect himself come across as the main reasons for the long delay in alerting passengers to what was really happening. Even so, the film also shows that the company’s claim that the tragedy resulted solely from human error is, at best, questionable.
There are holes in the narrative. We never learn exactly why or how 32 people died, for instance, which is a considerable gap. But “Shipwrecked” remains a well-constructed, gripping documentary, terrifying, haunting and moving.
