'All is Lost': High seas, high drama

ROBERT Redford's storm-tossed sailor says two words on camera in the engrossing "All Is Lost."

One is "Help!"

The other starts with "f" and is what you would say if a rogue cargo container rammed your fancy boat and punched a hole in the hull that sent water pouring over all of your electronic equipment, cutting all links to the outside world.

Fuuuuuu . . . dge.

So begins "All Is Lost," the purely visual (no dialogue) story of a nameless man (Redford) trying to survive in an angry ocean that deals him one devastating blow after another. (Redford, doing his own stunts, tumbles inside an inverted boat like a sock in a dryer.)

The storms gradually and forcefully take from him the physical tools of survival, leaving him only the will to live.

The movie is so simple, so conceptually pure (it's inspired by Jack London's stark procedural, To Build a Fire) that it seems to set itself apart from the spectral, afterlife-invoking approach of a survival epic like "Gravity."

But writer-director J.C. Chandor ("Margin Call") is a subtle guy, and there is more to this spare survival tale than meets the eye.

Note, for instance, that the movie is called "All Is Lost," and not "Lost at Sea." There is a difference there. It takes Redford's character quite a while to lose everything, because he starts with quite a lot.

This is not Tom Hanks in "Castaway." This guy is there by choice, and he's not on a raft, he's on a floating Four Seasons.

He wants to be a solo sailor.

But is he otherwise "at sea?"

The prologue establishes that the man is somehow estranged from people he loves. He apologizes for this. There is the implication that he's on the water searching for something, perhaps time to reflect.

The privilege of a wealthy man. So, there is some irony when the flotsam of international commerce rams his craft, flooding it with its cargo of Chinese-made shoes.

The boat is foundering, flooded, and everything in the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog is first to go. Laptops, phones, fancy protective clothes, even his single-malt scotch. Cruel fate!

In the process, the man comes to understand what is elemental, and essential. He learns to steer by the stars, to produce water from thin air (actually thick air, hence the condensation).

Watching Redford gratefully drink this miraculous thimbleful of conjured liquid is like watching a religious ritual.

While he has water, while he has life, he has will. He aims for the commercial shipping lanes, where the movie's first image - that cargo container bobbing in the water, is embellished in a sequence of scorching helplessness.

At this point, our man has done all there is to do.

Is it enough?

Don't expect the final images to answer that question. Instead, they prompt you to think about what you've just seen.

This inquiry may take you to the movie's most entrancing shots. Beneath the waves, looking up at the struggling man through a veil of indifferent sea creatures, older than time, swimming peacefully in the depths.

This isn't where life ends.

It's where it began.

Online: ph.ly/Movies