You can take the Raimi out of the horror, but you can’t take the horror out of the Raimi. It’s true, as one of our most diverse filmmakers, old Sam has deviated towards many different genres in his career (only his 1990s period a hard pivot from the stuff that made him a household name), but since the new millennium, if Raimi’s making a movie, expect there to be at least a jumpscare or two. He even daringly incorporated at least a few of his signature “cover your eyes”-type visuals into modern “family” blockbusters, sometimes in the finale (Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Oz: The Great and Powerful) or got it out right in the first act (the hospital scene in Spider-Man 2, anyone?). But it’s been 17 long years since Raimi has devoted all of his trademark gifts to a full-on horror, not since the wonderfully loony Drag Me to Hell, and it’s about damn time.

Now, we’re not dealing with demons from a cursed book or skeleton armies this time. Instead, Sam takes on ” island survival thriller”, which in the hands of anyone else would deal more psychological or existential, but Raimi’s version is always to push it as far as he can go to make you squirm and scream. Nightmare visions of the deceased! Fingers into eyeballs! Knives being poked into places they shouldn’t! Wild, angry boars that seem crafted by Satan himself! All in the service of a good laugh if you’re on the right wavelength. But it’s not just gross-out gags and torture porn, it’s a pretty great two-hander between Rachel McAdams disarmingly prepared office worker and her rich, entitled boss who must now bow to her instruction.

McAdams stars as Linda Liddle, a meek and dorky corporate strategist who struggles to get along with her staff who think “liddle” of her. After the president of her financial management company dies (never seen onscreen, but do keep an eye out for his portrait, it may look familiar), his son Bradley Preston takes over. Preston’s behavior towards Linda is immediately be-“liddling” (I’ll stop, I promise) and dismissive, even taking away a long-deserved promotion from her and giving it to one of his office mates (Xavier Samuel). Despite her heartbreak, she is tasked with joining Bradley on a business trip to Bangkok, but as fate would have it, their plane hits a cartoonish level of turbulence and crashes into the ocean. Linda wakes up on a beach, seemingly endless miles from civilization, but she is not the only survivor as Bradley washes up on shore soon after, wounded with a torn leg. As Bradley awakens, he discovers that Linda is far more capable than he could have ever imagined (she is a strategist, after all).

Outside of her office life, Linda is a Survivor-obsessive, having made audition videos and addicted to nights in front of the TV on the couch with her pet bird Sweetie and a library’s worth of survival textbooks stacked in her shelves. While Bradley is a horrified fish out of water desperate to get back to his pampered home, Linda thrives in the wild. In fact, too much. With the roles now reversed, Linda is the boss and if Bradley wants to stay alive, he must follow her every command.

McAdams is on steroids in this film, a role unlike anything she’s done before. Amusingly transformative from her frumpy posture and knitted cardigan look to physically dominant island leader, thriving on the chance to make a liveable oasis for herself and getting a high off the dangers of being lost in the wild. It’s as wild and wacky and scary a performance as Kathy Bates in Misery. O’Brien is fittingly cast as the corporate douchebag with an obnoxious laugh whose confrontation with his own mortality now drastically changes his personality. The cat-and-mouse game between Bradley and Linda goes in every direction it can, they are stuck alone on this island together for an endless amount of time anyway. The more we learn about Linda and Bradley through their actions and their vulnerable conversations by the fire pit keep us guessing as to who is “the good one” as well.

It’s clearly the best produced script by Mark Swift and Damian Shannon to date (whose previous work includes Freddy vs Jason, Shark Tale, Baywatch, and the Friday the 13th remake) and just a juicy premise to begin with. Beyond the premise, though, the structure of the story, especially under Raimi’s gleeful madcap eye, is brisk and air-tight. It doesn’t use all the famous Raimi tools in the shed like, let’s say, Drag Me to Hell does (or quite literally Evil Dead, of course), but it is an expertly-crafted fun time with two dynamite performances. Proof that it should be so easy to make horror-thrillers this exciting and entertaining. Just don’t make us wait 17 years again for another, Sam, we beg you.