3 minutes of readingJanuary 30, 2026 1:45 PM IST
Send help Movie review: Rachel McAdams is one of those faces, with her dimples and megawatt smile, that invites you to let your guard down.
That is precisely what cannot be done in this latest Sam Raimi film, described as a “survival horror”, but which is much more than that.
Better yet, you can’t quite put your finger on what it’s about, until the very end, with McAdams lending her character Linda Liddle a quicksilver quality that continues to surprise.
We meet her as this mousy but crucial cog in the wheel of a Fortune 500 company. So shy that her obnoxious boss Bradley (O’Brien) doesn’t even bother to remember her department. As McAdams keeps correcting, she is not “Linda from Accounting,” but “Linda from Strategy and Planning.” But she’s important enough that when he passes her over for the promised vice president position to give it to one of his friends, Bradley has to give Linda a lucrative bone as compensation.
That trade-off, of accompanying Bradley and others on a trip to Hong Kong for a merger, reverses the power dynamic of this one-way relationship. Along the way, somewhere in the waters off Thailand, Bradley’s chartered plane crashes. After her friends, who spent the flight mocking Linda in plain sight (particularly from an audition video she had made for the TV show Survivor) kill each other in a desperate fight to save themselves, Linda wakes up to find herself on a desolate beach.
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The only other survivor of the plane is Bradley, of course. And the tables have turned, of course. For a while, you roll your eyes at this “of course” trajectory of the movie where Linda’s superior wilderness skills trump Bradley’s silver spoon existence at every turn. Linda can build a shelter, make a fire, collect clean water, catch everything from fish to snails, crush herbs to make a kind of lotion, devise a basket as well as a straw hat, a wicker backpack and a shell chime, and even hunt a wild boar in a scene that is pure guttural glory.
Reluctantly, Bradley must admit that he is defeated.
But to what extent does Linda’s triumph go? You have to see this to realize it.
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McAdams achieves a film that lets all its aspects shine, without distractions of any kind; all the women exasperated to play nice and “look good” to bosses have their day in the sun (and sand); and all the men are shown how helpless they are without wearing their pants (literally in one scene).
Certainly, no man is an island. But women? Try asking.
Send movie cast help: Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien
Send help to the movie director: Sam Raimi
Send help movie rating: 3 stars