Survival of the Cynics
Sam Raimi’s Send Help is a horror-inflected suspense film, with gore and a feminist streak, despite coming from a male director and two male screenwriters. It gets heavy-handed at times, and it’s too long by about 20 minutes, but it’s still Raimi’s best film in years. Send Help does a good job juggling several different tones, and is bolstered by a true movie star performance from Rachel McAdams.
Raimi’s always been good at making different types of films, and his work has included one of the best-ever superhero movies (2004’s Spider-Man 2) and one of the most underrated crime dramas of the 1990s (1998’s A Simple Plan). Many moviegoers will always associate him with the first three Evil Dead films, and the type of gore he’s always done well, most recently (until now) with 2009’s Drag Me to Hell. Since then, Raimi’s been mostly inactive, making only the underrated Wicked precursor Oz the Great and Powerful in 2013 and one of the worst-ever Marvel movies, Doctor Strange and Multiverse of Madness, four years ago.
But now he’s back to gore, with a helping of social satire. And it mostly works. McAdams plays Linda Liddle, a mousy, socially awkward middle-aged woman who I’m going to assume was named in homage to Linda Lidsky, Frances McDormand’s character in Burn After Reading, by Raimi’s former collaborators, Joel and Ethan Coen. A long-suffering assistant at a company, Linda is passed over for a promotion and humiliated by her loathsome new boss, Bradley (Dylan O’Brien), who’s taken over from his late father and made the toxic workplace even more toxic. Nevertheless, he invites Linda along on a business trip to Thailand.
But then there’s a plane crash, killing everyone aboard besides the two of them, who end up marooned on a desert island. Fans of McAdams’ movie Game Night won’t be able to watch that scene without blurting out “Oh no, he died!” Once on the island, their roles are quickly reversed, as Linda, an aspiring Survivor contestant, proves much more adept at island survival than her boss. It’s soon clear that while Bradley wants to escape as soon as possible, Linda likes it there and is in no hurry. She also undergoes what seems like a slow physical and emotional transformation into a more familiar version of Rachel McAdams.
There are twists and turns in their relationship and status, perhaps too many of them. But the final punchline is satisfying. Plotwise, the film stacks the deck, absurdly, at every turn. If Bradley has so little respect for Linda, why invite her on the trip? How did her pet bird survive her long absence? And how does Linda’s hair continuously look better and better, the longer she’s on the island? I kept expecting some supernatural explanation about the island’s magical properties, a la Lost, but that never happened.