Starring Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien, this gets off to a promising start, but the plot twists are derivative and the tacked-on violence descends into exasperating silliness

Sam Raimi is back with this violent black comedy scripted by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, set on a desert island where two plane-wreck survivors are facing off. It’s a movie whose entertaining initial premise and shrewd satire are finally damaged by Raimi’s need to juice everything up with spurious “horror” flourishes for the fanbase, on-brand gore eruptions that aren’t really scary and undermine the film’s believability, turning everything into silliness. The poster and promotional materials promise a “horror” film, but that isn’t really what this is. But what is it? Well, it’s a desert island parable that owes something to JM Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton and to … how to say it? … other dramas. No spoilers, but Raimi appearing to borrow from a recent Cannes Palme d’Or winner was not, as they say, on my bingo card.

Rachel McAdams plays nerdy Linda Liddle, a single woman living alone with a caged bird. She’s devoted to her job. She is an extremely smart researcher in a corporation, but is passed over for promotion by the charmless misogynists running the firm: useless, untalented males in Patrick Bateman suits who depend on her work. Chief among these odious sexists is new CEO Bradley Preston, played by Dylan O’Brien, a vacuous smoothie and nepo princeling whose late father, the company founder, valued Linda enough to promise her a VP position – a promise on which the hateful Bradley now smugly reneges.