Madisha is being asked to trust the Australian Taxation Office at precisely the moment ordinary arrangements have stopped protecting her. She has lost her job, and her housemate is moving out to live with her boyfriend. An announcement that belongs to someone else’s romantic life becomes an immediate financial threat.
In Maddelin McKenna’s debut feature, Mad Rush, the Melbourne rental household is already fragile before the fraudulent calls begin. Senuri Chandrani’s Madisha has little room to absorb another disruption. The callers exploit that condition by presenting obedience as the quickest route back to safety.
Their borrowed authority has a specifically Australian vocabulary. Alongside the tax office, they invoke ASIO, the country’s domestic intelligence agency, bringing an intimidating scale of suspicion to a young woman’s depleted circumstances.
Claims about compromised identity become instructions to withdraw her savings and take the cash to a grocery shop’s supposedly secure deposit arrangement. The fraud is readily apparent to the audience. What requires explanation is the passage from Madisha’s initial suspicion to continued cooperation. Appeals to protecting friends and family give the manipulation a moral foothold.
McKenna’s Melbourne helps make that distress perceptible. Bonita Carzino photographs the central business district in subdued blues and greys, with a rough texture that keeps the streets from becoming attractive scenery detached from their occupant. Windows and tall buildings acquire an oppressive watchfulness. Josh Peters’s sound design finds a particularly effective instrument in the pedestrian crossing signal.
Its familiar insistence becomes difficult to distinguish from the urgency being delivered through Madisha’s phone. A system designed to help people move safely through public space starts to sound like another command. The city continues functioning while her ability to read its signals deteriorates.
The premise invites comparison with the sustained agitation of Uncut Gems, but McKenna gives this Australian film a looser relationship with thriller momentum. Madisha’s movement through Melbourne repeatedly opens into conversations that suspend the immediate business of the scam.
Those interruptions deserve to be judged on their own dramatic terms. A city film can discover its subject through apparently incidental company, and Mad Rush is often most attentive when the urgent errand loses its hold. The difficulty is connecting those encounters to a central action that otherwise keeps returning Madisha to the same bewilderment.
Chandrani supplies some of that connection through a performance with an abrasive surface. The eye rolls and exasperation protect Madisha from becoming an uncomplicated figure of suffering. She can seem impatient with a world she also needs to explain itself to her. That friction gives the quieter uncertainty somewhere to emerge from.
Yet the performance cannot make every act of compliance equally persuasive. Once withdrawing her savings leads toward the grocery shop arrangement, the script needs a sharper account of how each warning sign is overcome. The gap between what the audience understands and what Madisha accepts grows without a corresponding deepening of the persuasion.
Bert LaBonté’s Uber driver provides a useful change in the film’s conversational rules. His calm discussion of choices and setbacks allows Madisha to occupy a position other than that of the person receiving instructions. Here, another resident of the city has time for her confusion.
The exchange gives Melbourne a social dimension that the running passages cannot supply by themselves: people inhabit the same streets with different reserves of patience and experience. LaBonté’s warmth also gives Chandrani something to respond to besides menace. Her uncertainty becomes easier to understand when it is allowed to exist without immediately producing another bad decision.
A smaller remark about her ancestors’ imagined reaction to her difficulty eating hot food has a similar value. It brings inherited expectations into an undignified, everyday moment, without needing to explain Madisha through a fixed cultural identity.
Her sense of inadequacy can attach itself even to eating. Such details suggest a person accustomed to measuring herself against standards she cannot comfortably meet. They also give the film’s generational anxiety some individual texture. Joblessness and housing insecurity establish the circumstances; an embarrassed joke reveals how readily those circumstances can become a judgment she passes on herself.
The visual treatment is less selective. Slow motion, freeze frames, overlapping imagery, and repeated running passages keep breaking up Madisha’s progress, while the techno score supplies additional agitation. Initially, these devices express a credible dislocation between moving quickly and understanding very little. Their repetition gradually makes that condition familiar without substantially changing it.
At approximately 76 minutes, the film remains slight in duration but sometimes feels stalled. The pedestrian signal has a precise expressive function because it changes our experience of something belonging to these streets. Several later visual interruptions simply renew an anxiety the film has already established.
McKenna’s slow approaches toward people in conversation offer a different possibility: attention can produce movement inside a scene even when nobody is rushing anywhere. That patience is harder to find in the closing stretch, where Madisha’s explanatory speech spells out an intention that needs room to acquire dramatic consequences. The movement toward clarity feels compressed after so much time spent circling confusion. A statement of resolve cannot carry all the work of showing how someone’s relationship to her circumstances has changed.
The couple cleaning a church suggest a richer way of approaching that change. Their counsel gives Madisha a place to pause, and the setting’s comfort comes through people performing an ordinary task together. Read alongside the driver’s conversation, the encounter offers a modest account of belonging in this particular Melbourne: strangers can make a city briefly habitable when its official voices have become threatening. The housing problem gives that comfort a difficult limit. Returning to the practical question of how Madisha will live would have allowed these moments of care to meet the insecurity that makes them necessary.
Mad Rush held its world premiere at the Melbourne International Film Festival on August 14, 2026. Directed by Maddelin McKenna, the tense drama thriller follows a young woman trapped in an elaborate phone scam that sends her on a desperate, frantic odyssey through the Melbourne CBD.
Full Credits
Title: Mad Rush
Distributor: Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF Premiere Fund)
Release date: August 14, 2026 (Melbourne International Film Festival)
Rating: Unclassified 15+
Running time: 1 hour 16 minutes (76 minutes)
Director: Maddelin McKenna
Writers: Maddelin McKenna
Producers and Executive Producers: Sarah Clayton, Maddelin McKenna
Cast: Linda Cropper, Bert LaBonté, Senuri Chandrani, William McKenna, Hannah Camilleri, Verity Higgins
Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Bonita Carzino
Editors: Geri Docherty
Composer: Josh Peters
The Review
Mad Rush
Mad Rush finds its strongest material in Melbourne’s everyday contradictions: intimidating official language, insecure housing, and strangers willing to listen. Senuri Chandrani gives Madisha’s confusion an abrasive humanity, while the crossing signals turn familiar streets into sources of pressure. The scam’s persuasion remains unevenly developed, and repeated visual effects prolong distress without deepening it. McKenna’s debut offers an observant portrait of urban vulnerability inside a less convincing thriller.
PROS
- Chandrani balances defensiveness with vulnerability.
- Melbourne feels socially and visually specific.
- Pedestrian signals become effective instruments of anxiety.
- Conversations with strangers give Madisha emotional texture.
CONS
- Madisha’s continued compliance needs stronger dramatic support.
- Repeated visual effects stall progression.
- Closing explanations compress the development of her resolve.
