Harpoon

2019 1h 22m EN

😐

6.0

MID

🔥

97%

CERTIFIED FRESH

👌

METACRITIC

⭐

5.9

IMDB

★6.0TMDB · 211🍅97%Rotten Tomatoes●65Metacritic★5.9IMDB · 6,752

ComedyHorrorThriller

Synopsis

Spoiler shield

Rivalries, dark secrets, and sexual tension emerge when three best friends find themselves stranded on a yacht in the middle of the ocean under suspicious circumstances.

“Some stories are better left unspoiled.”

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Cast

Munro Chambers
Jonah
Emily Tyra
Sasha
Chris Gray
Richard
Brett Gelman
Narrator
Kurtis David Harder
Boat Castaway
Rob Grant
Michael Peterson
Robert Spina

Credits

Behind the camera

Director: Rob Grant
Writers: Mike Kovac, Rob Grant
Languages: English
Countries: Canada

Want more? Switch to Cinephile mode in the header for DP, composer, budget, box office, production companies, keywords, and release history.

Did you know?

Fun facts 🍿

1 / 6

RUNTIME

Did you know

82 minutes exactly — the "classic feature" runtime most directors aim for.

MoodPlayr · trivia#01

2 / 6

ERA

Did you know

Released 7 years ago.

MoodPlayr · trivia#02

3 / 6

DIRECTOR

Did you know

Directed by Rob Grant, shot by Charles Hamilton. Note their partnership — DPs and directors often return to each other across a career.

MoodPlayr · trivia#03

4 / 6

DIRECTOR

Did you know

Editor Rob Grant shaped the rhythm. On an edit-heavy film, the editor does more to control your pulse than the director.

MoodPlayr · trivia#04

5 / 6

CAST

Did you know

Munro Chambers and Emily Tyra and Chris Gray carry the top of the cast.

MoodPlayr · trivia#05

6 / 6

WILD

Did you know

IMDB entry: tt7831358 — still the authoritative cross-reference for credits and trivia.

MoodPlayr · trivia#06

Cinephile deep dive

The take

Rob Grant directs. Charles Hamilton behind the camera. Rob Grant cuts. Runs lean at under 100 minutes. Produced in Canada. Dialogue in English.

Trivia

Things worth knowing

182 minutes exactly — the "classic feature" runtime most directors aim for.
2Released 7 years ago.
3Directed by Rob Grant, shot by Charles Hamilton. Note their partnership — DPs and directors often return to each other across a career.
4Editor Rob Grant shaped the rhythm. On an edit-heavy film, the editor does more to control your pulse than the director.
5Munro Chambers and Emily Tyra and Chris Gray carry the top of the cast.
6IMDB entry: tt7831358 — still the authoritative cross-reference for credits and trivia.

The technical file

Cinematography: Charles Hamilton
Editing: Rob Grant
Production design: Tim Rutherford
Costume design: Deitra Kalyn
Makeup / hair: Ashley Marie Godick
Sound: Brad Belcher
Stunt coordinator: Ron Webber
Runtime: 82 min · 1h 22m
Aspect ratio (typical): 1.37:1 (Academy)
Status: Released
Original language: EN
Certification (US): 18A
IMDB: Harpoon (2019)
Rotten Tomatoes: 97% 🍅 Fresh
Metacritic: 65/100
IMDB rating: 5.9/10 · 6,752 votes
MPAA: Not Rated

Awards

4 wins & 3 nominations total

Also by

Rob Grant

Stills · wallpapers

Selected frames

Full-resolution frames — open one to save it as a wallpaper.

Wallpaper

Trailers & featurettes

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Community reviews

What people are saying

JPRetana2026-06-01
Harpoon (2019) is a yacht survival movie. This is a tricky thing to pull off. You want it to be character-driven, but you need it to be actor-driven. Would Dead Calm work without Sam Neill, Nicole Kidman, and Billy Zane? Would All Is Lost (the one-man variation) work without Robert Redford? On the basis of Harpoon, no. They would not. Then again, this film could star the Holy Trinity working for scale and it wouldn’t matter, because the script is narrator-driven, and the narrator isn’t even a character. He’s an omniscient snark machine — a Greek chorus for assholes. The narrator doesn’t serve the story; the story serves him. The voiceover begins before the film even does. Within the first five minutes, the movie literally freeze-frames twice while the narrator dumps exposition. Some of this clunky backstory concerns Richard (Christopher Gray), who is said to be “prone to fits of rage … one time [he] threw his laptop into his flat-screen TV all because he couldn’t remember the password to his own email account.” This is immediately followed by a scene where Christopher beats up Jonah (Munro Chambers) over misread text messages. That’s one of the film’s core problems: it announces what it should simply show, and it often announces things that it ends up showing anyway. It wants to be a comedy of errors, but it makes too many unintentional mistakes. Consider the intertitle that reads “Part 2 - Five Days and No Shipping Boats Later.” The joke is that there’s no Part 1. Fair enough. But the film can’t leave well enough alone — the narrator has to underline it: “As the chapter title so eloquently states, our trio had fallen on a stretch of bad luck.” Thanks for the recap. And then there’s the title. Harpoon hinges on a running joke in which Sasha (Emily Tyra) is corrected by the others: it’s not a harpoon; it’s a spear gun. The gag is quickly dropped, as if writer-director Rob Grant suddenly realized: “If I’m so smart, why didn’t I call the movie Spear Gun?” Incidentally, the spear gun is like Steven Seagal in Executive Decision. Once it serves its purpose, it’s unceremoniously written off in a moment of stupefying contrivance. But then, this screenplay is nothing if not contrived. What are the odds that, after five days without food and barely enough water for a Mexican shower, Richard will be accurate, strong, and lucky enough to hit a seagull midflight with a golf ball, kill it, and have it land right at his feet? Pretty good, if you need the seagull to lead to the next belabored plot point. The protagonists decide to drink the seagull’s blood for sustenance, which Sasha learned from Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. “So let me get this straight,” Jonah interrupts her. “You’re getting your survival tips from the same guy who wrote about the spaghetti monster?” The only way this line makes any sense is if Jonah is confusing Poe with Lovecraft and Cthulhu with the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Even if that’s the joke and you get it, it’s too baroque to be funny. If the Poe reference stopped there it would effectively foreshadow the movie’s climax, but the script is too cool for subtext, so it ends up telegraphing it instead. Granted, there is sort of a grisly twist. However, it doesn’t work because it’s not a result of Ocean Madness. The character who does something crazy was already revealed to have been a “psycho” since long before they boarded the yacht. Harpoon is a pretentious, solipsistic exercise. It would rather amuse itself than challenge the audience. Grant fancies himself awfully clever, quoting Aristotle at the beginning, oblivious that true wit would be Aristotelian, not Aristotle-quoting.