About a third of the way into Sam Raimi’s Send Help, Rachel McAdams’ purportedly meek office drone Linda Liddle stabs the wild boar she’s been tracking to provide food for herself and Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien), the obnoxious colleague she’s stranded on a remote island somewhere in the Gulf of Thailand with, in the face, its eye making an uncomfortably squelching sound as it pops out of its head, gooey blood spurting directly in Linda’s face, drenching her in crimson splatters. With its gonzo blend of horror and humor, it’s a scene that— if the exaggerated violence of the plane crash that landed them there didn’t already— loudly telegraphs that this isn’t the Sam Raimi whose previous two features were an MCU Doctor Strange sequel and a garish and puzzling Wizard of Oz origin story. No, this is the Sam Raimi of the Evil Dead series and Drag Me to Hell, who relishes in wild tonal shifts that dispense both laughs and gore with gleeful abandon, and working from a wicked script by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, he couldn’t be more back.
In a quick and effective opening montage, Send Help immediately sets up Linda— a distressing bit of casting for those of us who remember the now-47-year-old McAdams’ breakout role playing a bitchy high schooler in the 2004 comedy Mean Girls— as the out-of-touch employee at the financial management firm where she works at. She eschews form-fitting skirts of her hipper contemporaries for chunky knit pullovers and dowdy loafers, face framed by stringy, frizzy hair, and sits behind her desk, decorated with signs promoting generically-inspiring mantras, eating tuna and blasting Blondie in her earbuds. Her coworkers may not want her to join them for karaoke night, but she’s the best worker in the bunch, so much so that her recently deceased boss promised her a promotion to Vice President. But his hotshot young son Bradley is taking over as CEO, and his plans don’t include Linda, passing her over to give the position to one of his golf buddies who has only been with the company for six months and regularly passes off Linda’s thorough numbers-crunching as his own work. As a sort of consolation, he promises her a seat on the plane to Bangkok, where the company is preparing to finalize a pending merger. It’s en route to Asia when the plane goes down, leaving Bradley and Linda as the sole survivors. The entitled Bradley is virtually helpless, but some key clues that appear early in the film in a brief sojourn to Linda’s home, where she lives alone with her beloved pet cockatiel, the camera panning across stacks of books with titles like “Edible Plants” and “Survival 101” before she eagerly settles in to watch the newest episode of Survivor reveal something else about her: she’s been preparing for just this very scenario.
The deterioration of humanity when forced to go back to basics is well-trod cinematic territory. Send Help smartly avoids drowning in cliche by establishing the inherent animal traits in each of its two leads before they even reach the island; years of being kicked around the bottom of the corporate totem pole granted Linda the determination to not merely survive, but claw her way to the top of the chain, while Bradley is just a massive dick, the easy money and opportunities granted to him by the grace of nepotism having stripped him of any sort empathy for anyone he considers beneath him in class, attractiveness, or charisma. Send Help leans into the power play between these two people whose normal dynamic has been thrown into a blender thanks to their current circumstances, and it works so well in no so small part because of the game performances of the actors playing them. O’Brien slips effortlessly into a role that subverts his leading man looks and charm to belie something much meaner. But McAdams is a real delight and even a wonder to behold in a far trickier part that she can (at times literally) really sink her teeth in to, and allows her to utilize her flair for dry line readings and offbeat humor that made her so memorable in projects like the comedy Game Night. Linda’s unpredictability, which only seems to increase the more we learn about her (is she an perky nerd, or a lovesick loner, or a calculating killer?), is one of the purest pleasures of watching this film. We’re genuinely never sure what she’s going to do next, and it speaks to the effectiveness of the opening scenes in the office and the bro culture that constantly diminished her that the audience remains squarely on her side, even after she commits some decidedly unspeakable acts.
Just when we think that Linda and Bradley, thrown together by circumstance, may be zigging toward reaching some sort of truce, and even understanding for each other, Send Help zags. This is a survival movie where the elements are far from the main obstacle; the real conflict stem from Linda’s unwillingness to relinquish her newfound boss status. Frequent Raimi collaborators including composer Danny Elfman and cinematographer Bill Pope enhance the overall aesthetic, which features several Raimi stylistic and thematic flourishes: quick edits and jump scares, hysterical match cuts, surreal imagery that blurs the line between dreams and reality, propelling bodily fluids, and fast, disorienting zooms. There’s furthermore a lot of fun had with Linda and Bradley’s daily life on the island; the longer they’re stranded there, the more they settle into a routine that includes lavishly presented dinners of sushi and local fruit served on elaborate hand-carved dishes. Those touches balance out some questionable CGI, but as bonkers as Send Help becomes, there’s often a sense that Raimi is holding out on going full sicko mode, cutting away from the violence culmination of some scenes, entirely faking out the audience in another. As great as it would have been to see Raimi more fully commit to the gross and gory— because the gnarlier bits of business in the film are just so darn fun— I can’t say that it would have had a drastic impact on the film, which moves at an engaging clip that rarely loses steam right up to its epilogue, so amusing it cancels out its potentially irritating girl boss angle. Amidst its riotous upheaval of office politics, there’s something quite potent about what emerges as the film’s core message, wielded with all the bluntness of the hand-made wooden spear Linda employs to end that boar, or her repeated reminders to Bradley that her department title is “strategy and planning”: never mistake kindness for weakness.
Send Help is now playing in theaters. Runtime: 113 minutes. Rated R.
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