When it comes to director Sam Raimi’s films, you have to go into the theater understanding that you’re about to experience a piece of cinema that vacillates between being absolute batshit and utterly sublime. Though Send Help is much more grounded than the projects he’s best known for, like The Evil Dead or Drag Me to Hell, it’s a quintessential Raimi film that makes no pretense of hiding how unhinged and disturbing its story is going to be.
On more than one occasion, Send Help almost feels like a live-action cartoon. Its heavy-handed foreshadowing and ridiculous set pieces are meant to leave you wincing in horror before making you laugh at how ridiculous they are. But for all of its outlandishness, there’s something deeply relatable about the conflict that sets Send Help into motion and message and the way it depicts the horrors of working for a terrible boss.
Though most of Send Help’s story unfolds on a glamorous, deserted island somewhere in the middle of the ocean, the movie opens in a joyless office where Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) works as the head of planning and strategy. After dedicating years of her life to the company and saving it untold amounts of money with her expertise, Linda and one of her kinder coworkers, Franklin (Dennis Haysbert), know that she has been promised a much-deserved promotion by their boss. But when the company’s elderly CEO / founder unexpectedly dies and leaves the business to his boorish son Bradley (Dylan O’Brien), Linda is devastated to learn that the executive role that was meant for her has been given to an incompetent man who has only been working there for a few months.
While the news leaves Linda — a seemingly mild-mannered woman who reads like a riff on Batman Returns’ pre-transformation Selina Kyle — heartbroken, she is tenacious enough to confront Bradley about the situation and convince him to rethink his choices. He agrees to consider her for the gig if she accompanies him and a few other male executives on a work trip to their Bangkok office. During their flight on a small jet, it becomes clear to Linda that Bradley and his buddies are just stringing her along as a cruel joke. Linda is furious, but her rage quickly turns to desperate fear when the aircraft suffers a catastrophic malfunction and crash-lands into the ocean before sinking.
However terrifying you might think plane crashes are, Raimi’s approach to depicting that kind of accident is nothing short of breathtaking in the sense that it will leave you shocked and a little disoriented. The event gives Send Help a way of quickly (and humorously) thinning out its cast, but it also reveals novel things about its two leads. Washing up on an uninhabited island with no food or tools would immediately send most people into an existential doom spiral, but the situation is a dream come true for Linda, a longtime fan of the Survivor reality series. She sees her predicament as an opportunity to try out all of the things she has learned watching people compete on TV. And when Linda finds Bradley alive but badly injured further down the beach, she figures the two of them might as well keep each other company.
Though there is a whimsy to the way Send Help presents life on the island, the movie takes care to tease out the simmering tension that waxes and wanes between Linda and Bradley. It feels like Raimi wants you to lose track of how much time has passed since the plane crash, but you’re meant to see how being stuck pushes the two colleagues to become their truest selves. McAdams and O’Brien both lead with a delightful hamminess that makes their characters feel just short of being caricatures. As she begins to thrive in the elements, he becomes even more of a pompous asshole, and it takes a storm washing their camp away for the two to start seeing one another as allies.
While Send Help borrows a few notes from other island survival features like Castaway and The Blue Lagoon, you can feel Raimi teeing up a series of dark, Misery-adjacent twists that take this story in a markedly different and more stressful direction. As Linda and Bradley grow closer, their power dynamics repeatedly shift in unexpected ways, and the movie plays with your understanding of where the island’s true danger lies. What’s most unsettling is how hard it is to know whether the things the survivors tell each other about themselves are actually true. But Send Help’s final acts beautifully lay out all of the cards with an all-too-satisfying panache.
Though Send Help might not take you entirely by surprise, it’s a fun roller coaster of a film with a perfect understanding of when and how it needs to shift tones to be exciting. And if you’ve ever found yourself wondering what you might do if you were forced to survive alongside someone you hated, Send Help is more than worth the price of admission.
Send Help also stars Edyll Ismail, Xavier Samuel, Chris Pang, Thaneth Warakulnukroh, Emma Raimi, and Bruce Campbell. The movie hits theaters on January 30th.
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