.jpg?20260204')
Trouble in paradise unleashes satisfying spurts of blood and gore as Evil Dead director Sam Raimi returns to the horror genre in a hilariously unhinged survival thriller written by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift.
Rachel McAdams embraces the ungainly physicality and spiralling delirium of her reluctant anti-heroine, who turns the tables on bullying work colleagues in the most satisfyingly overblown and garish fashion.
Socially awkward savant Linda Liddle (McAdams) is a lynchpin of the Planning & Strategy Department at Preston Strategic Solutions – a brilliant mind with a toe-curling inability to read a room, who is long overdue a promotion to executive level as a reward for years of dedicated service.
When the current CEO dies, his flashy son Bradley (Dylan O’Brien) bullishly takes charge of the company and denies Linda a seat at the top table in favour of chauvinistic newcomer Donovan (Xavier Samuel).
The boys’ club repeatedly bullies and belittles Linda, and takes credit for her hard work, but she has the last laugh when the company’s private jet crashes en route to an important meeting in Thailand.
While most of the office ‘bros’ perish in the disaster (brilliantly realised with actors being sucked out of their seats), Linda escapes the water-filled fuselage and calls upon her survival skills, honed by watching her favourite reality TV series, to build a shelter, collect rainwater and hunt a wild boar.
Her resourcefulness in the face of adversity proves invaluable to keeping Bradley – the only other survivor – alive on an isolated island.
As days pass, tension escalates between Linda and Bradley with ghoulish and catastrophic consequences. Meanwhile, the CEO’s glamorous girlfriend Zuri (Edyll Ismail) leads the search for her missing beau, convinced he is still alive.
Send Help doesn’t need any assistance to delight and disgust, often in quick succession, galvanised by scintillating on-screen rivalry between McAdams and O’Brien, who kick sand in the face of political correctness to play out their battle of the sexes in grand flourishes.
McAdams plumbs the darkest depths of her frumpy character’s twisted psyche in sun-kissed, tropical surroundings. Screenwriters Shannon and Swift gift-wrap her some truly jaw-dropping interludes and she fully embraces the escalating madness without a hint of vanity.
Two wince-inducing scenes of bloodshed, realised with a blitzkrieg of physical effects and digital trickery, had me rocking back and forth in my seat with uncontrolled hysterics.
The head-on collision of ghoulish giggles and close-up carnage is reminiscent of Raimi’s wickedly entertaining early instalments of the Evil Dead franchise.
The constantly shifting balance of power between Linda and Bradley tees up wonderfully warped mind games and it’s difficult to second guess who might emerge victorious as morality is skewered and roasted over an open fire.
RATING: 7.5/10
&uuid=(email))