Rachel McAdams deploys her buttercup smile to lethal effect in Sam Raimi’s boisterous horror comedy Send Help, where she turns the tables on her noxious boss when they are marooned on a desert island.

Do you remember Robin Ostlund’s Cannes-conquering 2022 eat-the-rich satire Triangle of Sadness, and the way the desert island inverted the capitalist hierarchy between the Filipino maid and the oligarchs? It’s basically that film fleshed out with horror movie trimmings — vomit, burst eyeballs, buckets of blood — powered along by an unstoppable McAdams. The film is as subtle a Looney Tunes cartoon, as violent and as fun.

McAdams plays Linda Liddle, the mousy workhorse in the account department of a Fortune 500 company. Linda is a sight: chunky sweaters, orthopaedic shoes, a couple of protuberant moles. She’s long overdue a promotion but her new boss, Bradley (Dylan O’Brien), a bro who wears velvet loafers with no socks, passes her over in favour of a golfing buddy.

So when their corporate jet goes down over the Gulf of Thailand, the laws of dramatic irony dictate that Linda and Bradley are the sole survivors who wash up on a deserted beach together. “It had to be you, huh?” Linda says. If only the poor dude had seen Red Eye, he would have known that McAdams is the last person you want to find on your flight.

Instantly, the workplace misogyny that kept Linda pinned in place is upended, the corporate law of the jungle replaced with the real thing. An addict of the show Survivor, her bookshelves back home lined with survival guides and knot manuals, Linda is the one erecting a shelter, finding water, killing a wild boar for meat and serving it up with mango salsa.

Helpless Bradley with his gashed leg, on the other hand, is still the same jerk, lecturing her on what she is doing wrong and mansplaining the best way to signal for help. But Linda is in no hurry to leave. Catching sight of herself in a pool, she sees radiant skin, tanned limbs, Amazonian tresses of hair like the ones last seen sported by Brooke Shields in The Blue Lagoon. She’s thriving.

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You’d be hard pushed to devise a better part for McAdams, who, at 47, has kept her hand in, after the Oscar-winning Spotlight in 2015, with parts in the Dr Strange films, which brought her on to Raimi’s radar, and Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, but hasn’t had a great role since the underrated Morning Glory in 2010.

Hollywood condescends to no one faster than women it deems funny and sunny, which only adds another arrow to McAdams’s quiver as Linda, where she deploys her full arsenal — kilowatt smile, dimpled charm, indefatigable good cheer — while also drenched top to toe in blood and gore. “Ever hunt?” she says brightly after a dust-up with that boar that leaves her face streaked with arterial spray. “I think I like it.”

We’re not far off Kathy Bates’s perkily demonic turn as the superfan Annie Wilkes in Misery. I would go so far as to say it’s McAdams’s best role since The Notebook. Raimi directs with his usual boisterousness — which is to say, like a cross between Alfred Hitchcock and Tigger. He’s one of the few directors to come away from his brush with working on the Marvel Cinematic Universe with his batteries fully charged, partly because it taught him how to entwine his beloved horror trappings within, and at the behest of, other genres. He’s a wily creative force, and he’s twinned with another survivor, equally adept at smiling self-camouflage, in McAdams. They need to make another movie together.
★★★★☆
15, 113min

It’s clearly Dylan O’Brien’s week. I’d never heard of him a few days ago. Now here he is playing McAdams’s nemesis in Send Help and also the object of a stalker’s obsession in James Sweeney’s sneaky dark comedy Twinless. He plays the recently bereaved Roman, who has just lost his twin brother, Rocky. “I can’t make friends with a fork,” he confides to Dennis (James Sweeney), another member of his support group. Roman is straight, good-looking and a little dumb. Dennis is clever, conniving and gay. So the two start hanging out, going to hockey games, eating pizza, doing the groceries together, because they remind each other of their other halves.

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You might think that’s a set-up for an offbeat indie film — it won the audience award at Sundance last year — but Sweeney has a killer twist up his sleeve that turns the film upside down at the 30-minute mark and shifts it into darker, stalkerish territory. Like Patricia’s Highsmith’s Tom Ripley, Dennis is a classic Nowhere Man, nursing a vacuum where his personality should be. “How many texts can you send a prospective soulmate before you lose your self-respect?” he asks. The film shows how such vacuums of the soul can turn easily to mischief. It’s ticklish rather than uproarious, but it’s on to something.
★★★☆☆
15, 100min

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