The title is a navigational term. Dead reckoning is how sailors estimate their position when no landmarks are visible — no stars, no shore, only a known starting point, a heading, and elapsed time. It is a method built entirely on trust in one’s own calculation. The film uses this premise as something more than atmosphere: its story is precisely about a position arrived at by false reckoning, a love built on information that has been withheld.

Andrzej Bartkowiak came to directing from cinematography, a career that gave him eyes trained on the relationship between light and moral weight. His earlier studio action films — Romeo Must Die, Exit Wounds, Cradle 2 the Grave — were efficient genre exercises that knew their place in the ecosystem. Dead Reckoning is a smaller, stranger piece: a VOD thriller that begins in the register of a summer romance before the mechanics of a revenge plot arrive to claim it.

The setting is Nantucket, the Massachusetts island that literary tradition has long associated with departure and catastrophe — Moby-Dick set sail from there; no coincidence that the film chose it. Tillie (India Eisley) arrives for a summer stay with relatives after losing her parents in a plane crash. The crash has the quality of an accident until it doesn’t. Niko (KJ Apa) appears in the coastal light with the easy confidence that scripts assign to romantic leads, and the two begin the arc that genre films have made familiar: resistance, attraction, a disclosure that arrives midway through and complicates everything that followed it.

The disclosure is Marco. Scott Adkins plays Niko’s brother with controlled intensity — a villain who is not irrational but calculating, whose violence is organized rather than explosive. Adkins has spent a career demonstrating what a body can do in action cinema; here he is asked to demonstrate what a face can conceal, and he manages it with more craft than the film’s overall architecture can absorb. The plane crash, it emerges, was orchestrated. Tillie’s parents were murdered. The summer romance has been built, unknowingly, on the foundation of this concealed fact.

The screenplay’s central problem is tonal: it asks the summer idyll and the revenge thriller to coexist, and never finds the grammar to make them speak to each other. The warmth of the opening sequences is genuine — there is real craft in how the script establishes Nantucket as a space where tragedy has not yet arrived — but the transition to violence is abrupt in a way that reads as structural rather than deliberate. James Remar, as a figure from the past whose knowledge of events exceeds what he initially reveals, brings the professional gravity of a character actor who has spent forty years in exactly these kinds of genre constructions, and his scenes have an ease that the surrounding film reaches for but does not sustain.

Bartkowiak’s camera retains something of the cinematographer’s instinct for location — Nantucket’s wooden architecture and coastal light are used with more intelligence than the budget would lead one to expect — but Dead Reckoning ultimately navigates by a chart that does not quite match the territory. For viewers who appreciate a certain kind of B-movie craftsmanship, there is enough here to merit the investment of 91 minutes. As a dramatic argument about what we build on false ground, the film gestures at the question without answering it.