FAQ

When Canadian Air Force pilot Jack Ferriman (Desmond Harrington) recruits the salvage team from the tugboat Arctic Warrior to investigate a mysterious vessel he has spotted drifting in a remote region of the Bering Sea, they discover the remains of the Antonia Graza, an Italian ocean liner thought lost at sea in 1962. While boarding and making plans for towing, they begin to see strange things, e.g., Maureen Epps (Julianna Margulies) sees a little girl on the otherwise deserted ship, Greer (Isaiah Washington) hears a woman singing, and Captain Murphy (Gabriel Byrne) sees another face when he looks into a mirror. They also find a large cache of gold, but just as they decide to take it with them on the Arctic Warrior, the tugboat explodes, killing Santos (Alex Dimitriades) and leaving the rest of them stranded aboard the Antonio Graza, which is anything but deserted.

Ghost Ship is based on a screenplay by American screenwriters Mark Hanlon and John Pogue. The original idea was Hanlon's, and the original title for the movie was Chimera. Hanlon based his idea on the real life Italian cruise ship, the SS Andrea Doria, which sank in 1956 after colliding with another liner near Nantucket, Massachusetts. At least one version of the story has also previously been made, Death Ship (1980).

After Katie (Emily Browning) shows Epps what happened aboard the Antonia Graza back in 1962, Epps decides that the only way to keep Ferriman from continuing to lure people on the Antonia Graza in order to collect their souls is to sink it. She sets explosives, but Ferriman prevents her from blowing it up by hitting her in the head with a pole and knocking the detonator from her hand. However, Epps is able to grab a speargun, which she fires at the detonator, and the ship explodes, knocking her into the water. Katie shows her a way out of the boat, and Epps winds up floating on the water, clinging to a chest as the ship sinks into the sea, and watching hundreds of souls (presumably the ones that Ferriman couldn't mark) finally released from the ghost ship so that they could join their families. In the final scene sometime later (hours, days, weeks?), Epps is rescued. As she is placed in an ambulance, she looks out the doors to see the crates of gold being loaded onto a new ship followed by Ferriman. She tries to scream but is cut off when the ambulance doors close.