Visitors

It's not every person that would decide to sail around the entire world alone. Well... alone except for a cat and a two-way radio. Georgia Perry intends to be the first woman to make the trip. But it's not just a question of whether she can make it; it's also question of whether she can make it without going insane. Or is she already insane?

Sponsored by a make-up company that clearly doesn't understand why she's doing what she's doing, and backed by a boyfriend who's jealous that she might succeed where he's failed, Georgia's off to a rocky start.
 
She's clearly driven to make this voyage a success but she's just as clearly carrying some serious emotional baggage. Just how deep do the scars go?

It's not long before Georgia's cat is talking to her.  Then her dead mother shows up to chew her out. And when you're sailing through pirate-infested waters it might be better to imagine some pirates—but panic while you're sailing alone in the middle of the ocean, and you're putting your life in danger. And if the pirates are real, how should she deal with them? A woman alone on a small boat isn’t well-equipped to handle pirates.

Visitors may have been billed as a horror/ghost movie, and at times it feels that way, but it's really a psychological thriller. Georgia—and by extension the viewer—must know that some of the things going on are only in her head, but it's impossible to know if other situations are real. She has no way of knowing which are which, or if they're all just imagined. This creates an uncomfortably tense atmosphere for much of the film.
 
Radha Mitchell is excellent as Georgia. It’s a good thing too, since you’ll be seeing a lot of her. There’s a larger cast than you’d expect from a “one woman on a boat” movie, but it’s mainly Radha that carries the film. Susannah York and Ray Barrett have good bits as her parents, in very different ways. Her cat also deserves special mention as being an essential character in this film. If you’ve got to be stuck on a ship with a cat, it might as well be a talking cat.

Visitors is an unusual movie that won’t appeal to everyone.  If you’re in the mood for something slow and unsettling, with some nice ocean scenery, you could certainly do worse.