Send Help: An Energetic Return That Holds Back (Early Review)

Filmmaker Sam Raimi has found his new Bruce Campbell in Rachel McAdams, an eager, like-minded creative partner with whom to indulge in physically exhaustive, torturous on-screen hijinks. Together, they bring a feverish chemistry to the director’s first horror film in over fifteen years, Send Help. From escalating absurdity and inventive framing to the kinetic energy of its leads, the film is an entertaining, spirited return from one of horror’s pioneers. Yet, it reveals both the strengths and limitations of Raimi’s direction: his sidestepping of warped workplace power dynamics and Castaway-meets-Misery tension in favor of his idiosyncratic, energetic style leaves the film feeling too tame or slight for its own good.

The film centers on Linda Liddle (McAdams), a resourceful, hardworking, bright, albeit somewhat awkward, middle-aged woman and Survivor superfan who has grown restless at her stagnant office job. Her one shot at a promised promotion has been forgotten following a change in leadership, which sees not only the boss’s son, the bratty and smarmy Bradley Preston (O’Brien), taking over, but also one of Preston’s college buddies receiving a promotion.

Having had a couple of brief but flirtatious encounters with Bradley at previous office parties, Linda storms into his office demanding long-deserved recognition, only for him to respond with smarmy resentment and a lecture on “true leadership.” He advises her to prove herself on a trip to Bangkok for a company merger, but the journey is cut short when their plane crashes into the ocean. Linda awakens on the shore to discover a barely surviving Bradley, who has managed to stay alive by wearing an aptly named CHILD life vest. The survival of both Linda and her sexist, loud-mouthed, hyena-laughing boss now rests entirely in her hands.

Initially positioned as Raimi’s punching bag, McAdams embodies a quirky, awkward, over-prepared Dorothy Gale–type everywoman forced into Robinson Crusoe–style survival, before slowly curdling into an Annie Wilkes figure. Linda transformation is carried by McAdams’ precision; she plays her as a woman whose niche obsession has finally found its moment, disarming at first, then increasingly and unnervingly capable. Aside from some minor backstory, Bradley isn’t afforded the same level of depth, registering instead as a more broadly sketched, easily recognizable archetype of the young, arrogant tech-bro boss, yet O’Brien manages to hold his own against McAdams, shaping every tick, laugh, and gesture into the most pathetically strained exertion possible.

What’s perhaps notable is that the film’s island setting never truly feels dangerous as Raimi and cinematographer Bill Pope initially render the location as sterile, its lack of threats bordering on complacency in a squeaky-clean, greeting-card presentation. That emptiness, however, becomes the point: Linda takes to survival with ease—catching food, building shelter, even crafting a backpack—the ordeal morphing into something uniquely glamorous for her, especially when contrasted with the flailing, struggling Bradley.

With McAdams thirteen years older than O’Brien, Linda emerging from a divorce, while Bradley enters a marriage, the film teases the possibility of psychosexual dynamics at play, hinting at an eroticism or broader submissive/dominant, worker/boss tension that, for better or worse, is ultimately forsaken. Raimi cuts through much of the gender and age politics to get straight to the heart of his horror interests, in segments that recall the gross-out sections of Drag Me to Hell, albeit with a quarter of The Evil Dead’s blood levels. For most of the film, this disregard for theme is a non-issue, until the final act gestures toward Linda’s ultimate motivation in a way that plays more like a gag than a genuine emotional or thematic crux. Raimi’s approach to sexuality has always been somewhat timid, and while it’s one thing to avoid Gone Girl or Phantom Thread when serving up scares, this isn’t exactly The Evil Dead, either.

While it’s not quite a return to form for Raimi, Send Help succeeds in its mean streak and willingness to escalate the absurdity, delivering enough second and third-act twists to keep the premise from growing stale. Held together by two electric performances by Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien, the film ultimately feels less like a reinvention than a reminder: of Raimi’s enduring flair for physical comedy and sadistic set-pieces, and of a filmmaker having the most fun when pushing his actors to extremes, even if he stops short of fully excavating the darker psychological terrain the setup so clearly invites.

still courtesy of 20th Century Studios

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J.A. Birney

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