Self help at the tip of a knife
dir: Sam Raimi
2026
I have seen this movie many times, even though I’ve only seen it once. You have seen it before too, even if you’ve never seen it. True, that can be said of so many movies, but this is particularly familiar.
And that is okay. I don’t think this movie represents that much of a spin, or transformation of cheesy stock concepts or tropes to justify its existence, but I guess we are lucky it’s not terrible.
Two people survive a catastrophe, and end up on an island. Whether it’s Madonna, Tom Hanks, or Wilson the Volleyball, we know tough times are ahead for our Robinson Crusoe-like heroes.
The flick is not about surviving against the odds, or the desperation of almost getting rescued in order to return to a life of indoor plumbing and climate control / climate change-exacerbating comforts. It’s about two people trying to get what they want out of life. Since they want apposite things, only one of them can get their way.
Linda (Rachel McAdams) is a socially awkward white collar worker at some company. She is very good at her job (in the Planning and Strategy section, *not* Accounting), but she isn’t particularly well liked by her co-workers. She was promised a promotion at some point, but the failson nepo baby who has somehow inherited the business gives the job to someone who was in his frat, who wears suspenders and slicked back hair like American Psycho is back in fashion again.
Bradley (Dylan O’Brian) is an entitled, sexist abusive jerk who is disgusted by Linda because she’s a woman in her 40s. He intends to give her the flick from her job, but only after an ‘important’ junket to somewhere that will result in them having to take a private jet together.
Whittled down to the bare essentials by force majeure, meaning, their jet crashes and kills everyone else, the power dynamic of abusive smarmy boss and helpless employee dissolves into thin air, as Linda now has the upper most of upper hands.
Her years of social exclusion and not having much else to do has resulted in her becoming obsessed with the tv program Survivor one that has been running for like 50 seasons and which I’ve never watched an episode of, which in turn led her to become obsessed with survival skills with the hopes of perhaps one day competing on the show.
Now, clearly, is her time to shine.
It’s not only the opportunity to show up the uselessness of her boss that she finds delightful. As Bradley is incapacitated due to a leg wound, Linda has no problem building shelter for him and keeping him fed. It’s when he starts barking orders like they’re back in the office that she points out to him that the social rules that would operate in the States don’t apply here, because there’s no guarantee of rescue, and he’s entirely dependent on her, because he’s useless.
And just like that… well, I’ll admit that they somehow subverted one trope from these types of flicks. The deeply regressive and deeply political Lina Wertmuller flick from 1974 Swept Away had the two people on the island at least initially act as stand-ins for class warfare: She was a rich capitalist, and He was the swarthy Communist sailor, and without his help and protection, and a fair bit of sexual assault and being slapped around, she realises she has to submit in order to survive. And then when everything’s hunky dory, rescue means civilisation intrudes and renders whatever understanding they had meaningless.
In 2002 Guy Ritchie, on the back of his success with Lock, Stock and Snatch thought remaking Swept Away and putting his wife at the time, being Madonna, in it as the lead, was a recipe for success. Or maybe the abusive prick just wanted to watch someone else treat her terribly instead of himself, for a change. Either way no one liked that flick, and no-one has mistaken Madonna for an actress again ever since.
There was another version of this with Harrison Ford and Anne Heche which left class out of everything because, as Americans themselves will often tell you, America is a class-less society, and reduced it to a will they / won’t they romance between a 30 year old and a 60 year old, and then something something Temuera Morrison and some pirates show up to spice things up.
There is a far more recent film, and I can’t mention it’s title, because I think it would be too much of a spoiler, but it feels like that film influenced some of the script of this film, mostly, because it too features an angle where someone who was previously disregarded as just being ‘the help’ rises to a position of prominence because of their survival skills in a shipwreck context, and who also sees that there’s a choice about ‘returning’ to civilisation or maintaining their status in this idyll, and we never find out what that choice is, because that flick chickened out in its ending.
This flick does not chicken out. This flick early on indicates that they might not be that isolated, or that remote, and that if given a certain choice, a certain character is going to do whatever it takes to maintain the new status quo.
It also isn’t afraid to trade in gross out visuals to disgust and delight the audience. There is so much throwing up in this fucking film, almost as much as that other recent film I was alluding to, so if you’re horrified by the sight of that, simulated or otherwise, steer clear, definitely.
But we also have to remember, this is directed by Sam Raimi! Remember the Evil Dead films? Come on, this guy created entire sub-genres within horror / comedy, with the visuals to go along with it. A lot of bodily fluids get sprayed on both of our protagonists (equal opportunity offenders), and it’s not always blood. But there’s his other signatures as well, being a lot of horrible stuff happening to eyeballs, and a pretty demented sequence with an imagined vengeful spirit on the beach.
This flick is interesting in the sense that it’s saying something about people, about who they are, how they become who they are, and what they’re capable of, but it pulls off a certain amount of trickiness in that it doesn’t absolve any of the characters from their actions.
The simplistic set up of having two people with completely different motivations and levels of power, in no way designates who is “right” and who is “wrong” in this circumstance. We judge people based on their actions, not just what they say or what they allude to as being the cause of their shittiness as people.
I guess what I’m getting at is that this flick makes you think Bradley is a piece of shit and that Linda is a decent person, and while that might be true, that’s not where things stay. During a brief moment of respite, when they’re drinking some alcoholic beverage Linda has concocted, and Bradley seems to be sharing details of his abusive childhood, I for one wondered whether he was just being manipulative. And the thing is I was the one who was being simplistic about it. Why couldn’t it, in the scheme of things, be true, and also a way for Bradley to try to manipulate Linda?
For her part she trots out the line about monsters being made so by their experiences, rather than any innate characteristics. And then the flick goes out of its way to convince us that sometimes people become monsters because they fucking well want to.
I kept wondering whether the flick was see-sawing between showing that Linda was the villain or that Bradley was, as in, who is really justified by their actions, and then I realised; oh no, the flick is saying they’re both monsters, and only one of them is going to make it out alive. Throw all them ideas about ethics and morality out the fucking window: the rules of civilisation don’t apply on the island. It’s survival of the nastiest, from here on in.
The performances are as good as they need to be in this for this kind of flick. Rachel McAdams has made a career of delivering great performances even in flicks that don’t serve her solid acting. Here she gets to go full maniac, to stunning effect. She goes feral, and seems ecstatic about it. The flick gives her such an incredible glow up when she reaches Peak Linda, as if to say now, when she’s in paradise and in control, she can finally bloom.
And from that blooming comes so much brutality and destruction. Because, after all, if you’ve found your niche in life and your peak final form, would you allow that to be taken away from you? Would you let Bradley take that away from you?
I think this flick works for the most part. It feels somewhat strange what they do with the sexual undercurrent, in that it’s kept entirely as an undercurrent, and yet even Tom Hanks and his volleyball got more action than our babes in paradise do here. Maybe that wasn’t the direction they wanted this version of this story to go, however dependent the other ones were on it. Ah, but now I’m remembering: Those were pretty much romances, and this flick very much is not.
No, it’s pretty much comedy horror by the end. There’s no profundity to be found by trawling through this flick for meaning or messages: this flick is to be enjoyed for its visceral thrills and for its determination to make its protagonist earn her title as the Queen of Survivor(s).
By any means necessary.
7 times Regina George is back and she’s telling you to stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen or she’ll kill you out of 10
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“Now, never mistake my kindness for weakness.” – oh, okay - Send Help
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