Film / Harpoon

A 2019 horror/comedy movie directed by Rob Grant and starring Munro Chambers, Emily Tyra, and Christopher Gray as three friends who get stuck at sea when their yacht's engine breaks. As their situation deteriorates, things take a darker turn as they consider cannibalism and make disturbing revelations about each other. Brett Gelman is the movie's unseen narrator.

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Tropes featured in Harpoon include:

• Abusive Parents: Jonah's parents (who were substantially older than himself) were loveless, stern, and disapproving.
• All for Nothing: Jonah's plan ultimately fails because Sasha doesn't want to run away with him. She is also so disgusted by his actions that she shoves him overboard to his death.
• Ambiguous Situation: It's implied by Jonah's remark that they are "sleeping together" (in contrast to Sasha's correction they "slept" together) and his unwillingness to explain the heated conversation he'd had with Sasha, that Jonah and Sasha may have hooked up more than once, but it's never clarified and left as a one-night stand.
• An Arm and a Leg: Jonah's infected arm is all that remains of him after he gets chewed up by the yacht's propellers.
• Asshole Victim: It's a toss-up which character deserves their fate more.
• Betty and Veronica: Jonah is the Betty (poor, pathetic, and vanilla, but lovestruck, calmer, smarter, and kinder) to Richard's Veronica (rich, sexually-charged, and enables an exciting lifestyle, but a violent, unstable cheater). Though The Reveal that Jonah is a delusional murderer and Richard, though still violent and unstable, can't even compare to his behavior, throws this all into a blender.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Jonah killed a pregnant woman and then kills Richard.
• Born Unlucky: The aptly-named Jonah has had a lifetime of bad fortune. He spends his life trying to appease his parents, even saving up a ton of money so that they can have a trip of a lifetime, only for them to die on the trip, leaving him with little inheritance due to their debts, and since their house is repossessed, he's effectively homeless; and then, Richard knocks their ashes over. And this is all before he steps foot on the boat.
• Bread Milk Eggs Squick: According to the narrator, Sasha's role in the group is "girlfriend, mother and referee".
• Cassandra Truth: Richard denies killing his ex-girlfriend after she became pregnant, but he has done so many horrible things that Sasha doesn't believe him. But he's being truthful. It was actually Jonah who killed her.
• Chekhov's Skill: Sasha's ability to throw a strong punch.
• Didn't Think This Through:
  • Jonah's plan, to leave them stranded without food and water until they have to kill Richard out of necessity to survive. Then, he and Sasha can flee together. Unsurprisingly, it doesn't work.
  • Jonah thinks that they can tell the authorities that they killed Richard and ate him in order to survive. However, the incident aboard the ''Mignonette'' that Sasha and Richard spoke about established that survival cannibalism does not justify murder.
  • They also roll Richard off the yacht while he has the keys in his pocket, so they have to let him back on board.
  • Richard takes his friends out on his yacht without even bringing minimal supplies of food and water. Though he justifies it by saying that he thought it was only going to be a day trip, but even that shows a lack of preparedness for any emergency.
  • In their haste to remove any potential murder weapons from the yacht, they toss out things that might have been useful while they were stranded, like fishing rods. Richard even insists they throw out a perfectly good tuna, thinking it could be a weapon.
• Dogged Nice Guy: Jonah, to Sasha. Richard calls him out on this, pointing out that he's not as innocent as he likes to portray himself.
• Downer Beginning: Shows Jonah packing up after his recently deceased parents' home is repossessed by the bank, leaving him broke and alone, and even the prostitute whose services he paid for had robbed him. Then Richard arrives and beats the tar out of him.
• False Soulmate: Jonah to Sasha. Evidently they had different ideas about the significance of their one night stand.
• Foreshadowing: When Jonah and Sasha try to get the keys from Richard, he points out that Jonah has never driven a boat and Sasha is terrible at it. When she does get her chance to escape on the boat, she is completely unaware of the fact that she needs to brace herself, and she topples into the ocean, stranding herself.
• Gilligan Cut: Richard assures them there is a 90-10 chance they'll be spotted by a ship.
  Onscreen title: Five days and no shipping boats later...
• Hair-Trigger Temper / Crazy Jealous Guy: Richard beats Jonah to a pulp when he thinks he slept with Sasha. He also nearly strangles Sasha to death for the same reason.
• Happy Ending: Subverted. Sasha has survived the ordeal, Jonah and Richard are both dead, the engine is working and it looks like she's about to escape... then she pushes the throttle and the yacht's sudden acceleration throws her into the sea as the boat speeds away without her.
• Harpoon Gun: Richard's birthday present from Jonah and Sasha. It's set up as a Chekhov's Gun, but only gets used once and is tossed overboard halfway through.
• Heroic BSoD: Sasha briefly shuts down when Jonah murders Richard and reveals he's been plotting this all along as a plot so they can run away together, but snaps out of it in time to kill him.
• Hope Spot: Sasha kills Jonah and manages to get the boat back up and running... Only to lose her balance and fall into the ocean as it speeds on without her.
• Jerkass: Richard is a short-tempered, spoiled rich boy who savagely beats Jonah on the mere assumption that he's slept with his girlfriend. The narrator notes that he once destroyed his own flat-screen television with an expensive laptop because he couldn't remember his own password.
• Laser-Guided Karma: After brutally killing Richard, along with the earlier revelation that he murdered a pregnant woman in cold blood, Jonah is this in spades once Sasha kills him. It's even lampshaded by the narrator.
• Life-or-Limb Decision: Jonah is faced with one of these when his wounded hand becomes infected, but they don't get any further than a cut to his bicep.
• Lost at Sea: The group's ship dies while they're at sea, taking them far from shore with little hope of rescue.
• Love Triangle: Richard and Sasha are dating, but Jonah, their best friend, is in love with Sasha. To complicate matters, they slept together after Richard wouldn't stop cheating on her. And Jonah's intent is to Murder the Hypotenuse.
• MacGuffin Title: Richard's harpoon gun. It actually has little plot relevance, as it is only used once, when Sasha accidentally shoots Jonah in the hand, and also gets tossed overboard halfway through.
• Make It Look Like an Accident: Sasha and Jonah place Richard's unconscious body at the edge of the yacht, so it will roll off and they can claim he just fell overboard and drowned. Instead, it just wakes him up.
• Minimalist Cast: The film only has three characters and no one else is ever shown onscreen.
• Mistaken for Cheating: Richard beats up Jonah when he thinks he slept with Sasha, but they convince him they were just planning his surprise birthday gift. In fact, they were sleeping with each other.
• Monochrome Past: When Sasha discusses past shipwrecks in which the survivors sacrificed and ate one of their number, the flashbacks are in grainy black and white.
• No Party Like a Donner Party: After several days at sea with little food and water, the trio draw lots and resolve to eat the loser. They never actually go ahead with it though.
• Onscreen Chapter Titles: Outlining the group's total lack of progress and declining hopes.
• Papa Wolf: Richard's father, a wealthy man with criminal connections, was strongly implied to have murdered a convicted pedophile who was teaching at his son's school.
• Platonic Prostitution: Jonah is said to have hired a prostitute, and spent the night talking to her. Then she robbed him.
• Posters Always Lie: One of the movie's posters depicts all three friends stuck in the ocean together
• Privilege Makes You Evil: Richard
• Properly Paranoid:
  • Richard suspects that Sasha cheated on him with Jonah. He's right.
    • He's also paranoid that the other two will try to kill him even after the truce, and sets up an elaborate sleeping situation so that it will be harder to kill him in his sleep. Jonah has been trying to murder him all along.
• The Reveal: Two near the end. It was Jonah, not Richard, who decided to kill Richard's pregnant ex-girlfriend to keep the three of them together. And we learn that they are only stranded because Jonah deliberately pulled a fuse from the yacht's fuse box and hid some food as part of his scheme for them to murder Richard and run away together.
• Rewatch Bonus: The whole film takes a different tone with the knowledge that Jonah had been plotting to kill Richard ever since he discovered the fuse box.
• Running Gag:
  • Sasha mistakenly calling the spear-gun a Harpoon Gun, and getting corrected.
  • Jonah getting mocked for having sex with prostitutes, which he insists only happened one time.
• Shout-Out:
  • When Sasha suggests they could swim home, Richard mentions the last scene of Jaws when Brody and Hooper swim home after killing the shark:
  Richard: Those fuckers are dead, straight up!
  • They discuss a novel by Edgar Allan Poe^note The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket in which the stranded survivors of a shipwreck draw lots and kill and eat a cabin boy in order to survive.
• Sole Survivor: Sasha, although she is stuck in the ocean and has barely eaten or drank in three days, so she probably won't last long without help.
• Unfortunate Names: Jonah, due to the historic superstitions associated with that name. It turns out that Richard Parker is not a fortuitous name to have aboard a ship either.
• What Does She See in Him?: Sasha and Richard. He is vapid, abusive and prone to uncontrollable violent outbursts. He does buy her expensive things though. It is also implied that she prefers bad boy Richard to the vanilla Jonah. Even after everything's that happened, she mistakenly refers to him as a current boyfriend instead of an ex.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: As Richard points out, Jonah sees himself as the sensitive, hopeless romantic who would sacrifice anything for Sasha, who doesn't even love him. He views murdering Richard as a way to free Sasha so that they can run away together and finally be free, but Sasha is horrified by his actions and has to lie to him when she realizes that he'll snap and kill her if she rejects him.