Rachel McAdams: Feisty Castaway in Comic Thriller

Send Help (15, 113mins)

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Before last week’s premiere of Send Help at the Odeon Leicester Square, director Sam Raimi, introducing his film, tried hard to be funny. 

When his jokes fell flat, he resorted to slapstick. It was more than a little excruciating, but it certainly made everyone yearn for the movie to begin, if only to get him off stage. Maybe it was a deliberate tactic.

Raimi’s many credits include the Evil Dead franchise, the Spider-Man trilogy, the revisionist Western The Quick And The Dead and the darkly gothic crime drama A Simple Plan. 

He’s the furthest thing from a one-note director, and with Send Help he shows it, blending several genres, uneasily at times, but compellingly too.

Comedy, social satire, survivalist-thriller and gross-out body-horror all vie for prominence, wrapped up in a parable about an underdog fighting her corner. 

This film is not for everyone, but it swept me along on a wave of what, by the end, felt like exhilaration.

The story begins in the US offices of a financial services company, where the nervily diligent Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) is eager to remind new boss Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien) that his late father, the company’s founder, promised her a promotion.

She deserves it, too. Nobody works harder or more efficiently than Linda. But Bradley has no time for her. 

Rachel McAdams stars in Send Help (2026) a comedy, social satire, survivalist-thriller and gross-out body-horror all vie for prominence, wrapped up in a parable about an underdog fighting her corner

The story begins in the US offices of a financial services company, where the nervily diligent Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) is eager to remind new boss Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien) that his late father, the company’s founder, promised her a promotion

Indeed, she repulses him. He’s an entitled, sexist slimeball, who only rewards the sycophants he plays golf with and is not about to indulge the frumpy office nerd, no matter what his father promised her – and however good she is at her job.

McAdams, it has to be said, is not an obvious choice to play a frump. But she does so impeccably, and hilariously.

In her spare time, with all the focus she applies to her professional life, Linda studies bushcraft and survivalism. 

She has even applied to be on a TV show, Survivor, which becomes a source of ridicule when Bradley and his obnoxious entourage find her audition tape online. 

By now they are all on a company jet bound for Bangkok, where they reluctantly need Linda’s help in closing a deal. 

You don’t need to have seen the trailer to foresee what happens next. The plane crashes in a storm and the only two who make it out alive, washed up on a remote island in the Gulf of Thailand, are Linda and Bradley.

From here the narrative starts to follow a predictable trajectory: it doesn’t look as if rescue is imminent so Bradley finally learns to appreciate Linda’s skills, not for spreadsheets but for building shelters, sourcing drinkable water and even despatching savage wild boars. The unlikely pair duly bond, and there are distinct hints that romance might flourish.

Will Bradley put right the many errors of his ways, while Linda at last discovers what it feels like to be cool? 

Might they even become soulmates? Or will Raimi, working from a screenplay by Mark Swift and Damian Shannon, whisk us off in a different direction altogether, as if a strong ocean current has suddenly and unexpectedly changed course? 

As long as you have a reasonably strong stomach, it’s a surprising amount of fun finding out.

Dylan O’Brien, I should add, is also very nicely cast in Send Help. But it’s in another of this week’s releases, Twinless, that he really flexes his acting muscles, to say nothing of his real ones.

James Sweeney’s dark but touching relationship comedy – set mainly in Portland, Oregon – is a treat. 

It has echoes of Scarlett Johansson’s recent debut feature, Eleanor The Great, but it’s smarter and more engaging, with terrific performances from both O’Brien and Sweeney himself.

O’Brien plays Roman, whose identical twin Rocky (played in flashback, also by O’Brien) has died in a road accident. They were strikingly different in all departments except looks: Rocky was gay, flamboyant, witty, bright, whereas Roman is straight and somewhat dim, with anger issues exacerbated by Rocky’s abrupt death.

He starts attending therapy sessions specifically for bereaved twins, which is how he meets Dennis (Sweeney), who has lost a twin brother too, also in an accident. 

Like Rocky, Dennis is gay. And sharp-witted. The differences between him and Roman recall those between Roman and Rocky, but without the powerful bond of twinship. 

Nevertheless, the two become firm, mutually reliant friends.

To tell you more would be to venture into spoiler territory, but there is plenty more, springing from a narrative twist that, perhaps obtusely, I didn’t see coming at all. 

It’s very nicely scripted, sensitively acted, and deservedly won the audience award at last year’s Sundance Film Festival.

Also showing: startling modern-day Hindu Hamlet (but alas, no Yorick) 

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Riz Ahmed stars in a modern-day Hindu Hamlet (Hamlet, 15, 114 mins, 2026)

There have been dozens of screen adaptations down the years of William Shakespeare’s bloody tragedy Hamlet, with Laurence Olivier, Mel Gibson and Kenneth Branagh among those who have earnestly to-be’d and not-to-be’d their way through the title role.

Now it’s the turn of Riz Ahmed to play the vengeful prince, in a version of Hamlet (15, 114 mins, HHHII) mostly faithful to the original text but set in modern-day London, within a wealthy, dysfunctional Hindu family. 

Elsinore in this case is not a castle but the family’s powerful corporation.

Ahmed, a passionate actor even in much lighter-hearted fare, is formidably intense as the young man aghast to learn that his mother, Gertrude (Sheeba Chaddha), is marrying his uncle, Claudius (Art Malik), later discovering that Claudius also murdered his father. Well, you know the story.

It’s fiercely told in Aneil Karia’s film, which makes a few character and plot omissions (alas, poor Yorick doesn’t get a look-in). 

But it’s splendidly acted (the strong cast also includes Timothy Spall as Polonius, Joe Alwyn as Laertes and Morfydd Clark as Ophelia), and among several startling scenes treats us to the memorable spectacle of Hamlet delivering his famous soliloquy while speeding through East London in a BMW.

The Chronology Of Water (18, 128 mins, HHHII) offers no respite from full-on intensity. Kristen Stewart’s first feature as a director is an admirably inventive, occasionally indulgent, inevitably grim adaptation of a memoir by the writer Lidia Yuknavitch (very well played by Imogen Poots), detailing the terrible and long-lasting psychological effects of childhood sexual abuse.

As a girl, Lidia is an aspiring champion swimmer, relentlessly bullied and abused by her father. 

She eventually escapes to college but is too damaged to treat her sweet-natured boyfriend with respect, seeming more comfortable with the predatory attentions of her creative writing tutor, the counter-culture hero Ken Kesey (Jim Belushi), author of the celebrated novel One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. 

It’s a tough watch, but on the whole an impressive debut by Stewart.

All films reviewed here are in cinemas now.