Film reviews: Psychological thriller Send Help serves as wish fulfilment for oppressed employees
Rachel McAdams stars in desert-island horror thriller "Send Help"
★★★☆☆
Overworked, unappreciated, and underpaid, Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) is rapidly approaching the end of tether as Send Help (15A) opens.
Promised a promotion, only to be overlooked by her new boss Bradley (Dylan O’Brien) — himself a nepotism appointment — Linda is crushed as she boards a private jet to Bangkok in the company of Bradley and his coterie of frat-boy sycophants.
But when the plane goes down in a storm in the middle of the Indian Ocean, marooning the resourceful Linda and the hapless Bradley on a desert island, the power dynamic reverses.
“We’re not in the office anymore, Bradley,” Linda sweetly informs her injured employer when he attempts to issue orders.
A “kind of savant” who specialises in strategy and planning, Linda is modern-day Dorothy bending Oz to her will as she sets about carving out a life from the jungle’s raw materials.
Pleasant and polite, eager to please, Linda does her best to help Bradley recover — until Bradley shows his true colours, and the story flips into a gory re-run of Lord of the Flies.
Written by Mark Swift and Damian Shannon, and directed by horror veteran Sam Raimi, Send Help is a blackly comic psychological thriller that serves as a kind of wish fulfilment for oppressed employees.
Rachel McAdams is terrific here, as Linda — who aspires to appear on the Survivor TV show — sloughs off her mousy ‘Suzy Homemaker’ persona to reveal the ruthless, steely-eyed killer within, while Dylan O’Brien is suitably sleazy as the whiny, entitled Bradley, who belatedly realises that a life of privilege has failed to prepare him for the harsh realities of an unsheltered life.
Superb in its set-up, the story loses some of its punch once events escalate into the grotesque and the preposterous; even so, you’ll still be cheering Linda on as the final credits roll.
★★★★☆
“The world doesn’t treat deaf people fairly,” says Sean with the kind of understatement that characterises A Quiet Love (12A), a documentary directed by Garry Keane that follows three deaf couples. John and Agnes met during the Troubles, and had to battle sectarianism as well as hearing discrimination; Kathy and Michelle contend with a motherhood complicated by the fact that one of their young daughters is deaf and the other hearing; while Sean, whose ambition to become a boxer will require the surgical removal of his hearing implant, is supported by his partner, the hearing Deyanna.
The first film to employ Irish sign language, A Quiet Love eloquently explores the couples’ travails and triumphs, and frequently digresses to investigate problematic aspects of day-to-day living that the hearing simply take for granted.
It can get a little platitudinous when the contributors make sweeping statements about the power of love conquering all, but for the most part this is a fascinating, tender, and inspiring account of navigating “the obstacles and frustrations” of being deaf in a hearing world.
★★★★☆
André is an Idiot (15A) takes its title from the response of André Riccardi’s mother when he rang to tell her he had been diagnosed with stage-four colon cancer.
“What an idiot,” she says, setting the tone for this documentary, which is directed by Tony Benna.
The idiocy, we learn, is that André didn’t get a very simple colonoscopy when he turned 50; now 52, and an advertising creative by trade, he decides to make a film that charts living with cancer and strives to bring colonoscopy awareness into the mainstream.
A man of singular imagination — “André’s the most brilliant idiot you’ve never met,” we’re told — André takes an irreverent approach to engaging with chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and the prospect of dying. It’s “surprisingly boring,” he tells us.
Charming, profound, hilarious, and wholly unsentimental, André is an Idiot is a powerful testament to the strength of the human spirit.
- All theatrical releases
