Sam Raimi’s Send Help is a spiritual successor of sorts to his satirical 2009 supernatural horror film Drag Me to Hell, which carved into the gender dynamics and exploitative power structures of the white-collar workplace in anxious, splattery, and, above all, timely fashion. Though absent the supernatural hook of the earlier film, this survival thriller about power and privilege also finds Raimi’s earnest humanism coming to blows with his pitiless Old Testament moral sense—with plenty of gags and gore along the way.
The mousy Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) works in her company’s Planning & Strategy department as a manager. Though she’s profoundly intelligent and committed to her work, she’s undervalued due to her low self-esteem and scattered demeanor. This gets much worse when the company CEO dies and hands the reins of succession to his chauvinistic son, Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien), who seems to get a kick out of vulgar exercises of power and favors his fraternity buddies over his own more qualified employees for elite company positions.
Bradley quickly comes to hold Linda in a special contempt. She’s a woman who defines herself by her brain at the expense of her body—unlike his doting fiancée, Zuri (Edyll Ismail). She’s more interested in working than socializing, and far better at it than he is. And she’s an anxiety trigger for his visceral responses to uncleanliness. In passing Linda up for promotion, Bradley informs her that despite her talent with numbers, she lacks the necessary assertiveness and networking skills to succeed at the highest levels of corporate employment.
Just as it looks like Linda’s career at the company is over, a plane crash kills most of her co-workers in squishy fashion and leaves Linda and Bradley stranded alone on a jungle island off the coast of Thailand. Bradley is wounded and doesn’t know the first thing about outdoorsmanship, while Linda, being a Survivor superfan, soon realizes that this is the moment the universe has been leading her toward. Her unique knowledge of foraging, crafting, and hunting prompt a rapid upheaval in her relationship to her crippled boss.
What ensues is an immensely effective tropical island-set chamber drama in which the two characters see their gender and labor relations start to reverse in ways that eventually reveal surprising ambiguities: Bradley comes clean about his troubled upbringing, while Linda comes to enjoy her new position of power maybe a little too much. The film’s dramatic question is whether these two opposites can synthesize, but first, of course, they have to survive the elements and each other, and it’s to this end that Raimi gleefully incorporates all the R-rated effects that have been missing from his work for too long.
In a media landscape where even Mark Ruffalo is giving us a bad Donald Trump impression, it’s commendable that O’Brien wasn’t tasked with playing one half of Send Help’s two-hander on the allegorical nose. If Bradley’s boyish aura, weapons-grade petulance, and apparently natural eyeshadow look call anything immediately to mind, it’s Peter Parker’s “Bully Maguire” heel turn in Spider-Man 3, spun off into its own character and let loose on an entire film.
Raimi isn’t too fond of subtlety, obviously. On top of its broad performances of stereotype-with-a-twist characters, Send Help also allows him to work in moments of his deeply felt Looney Tunes influences, as in a sun-drenched fade-in montage of Bradley’s deteriorating facial expressions as he tries going a week on his own, or the general construction of dramatic situations resembling bloodier (and, arguably, more erotic) confrontations between Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. And as Linda literally lets her hair down and comes into her element, she transforms from ego-negative office drone to trickster and warrior queen, a change that McAdams handles gracefully while preserving the dorky, twangy core of the character.
Much of Send Help’s appeal lies in watching Linda come up with new ways to tease, torment, and batter the entitled and ungrateful Bradley until his swollen ego ruptures. But Raimi and screenwriters Damian Shannon and Mark Swift are also alarmed by the impulse for brutal justice that they indulge. Linda earnestly questions how much sympathy or strict ethical decency she should show her would-be oppressor turned victim, while the film empathetically juggles the nervous perspectives of both characters. It gradually invites the audience to ask when, if at all, Linda’s survivalist mindset and responses to oppression go too far, are too undergirded in the logic of her oppressor, or are exactly as brutal as the situation warrants.
Send Help is zeitgeisty without being ostentatious about it—for Raimi, another sleek retrofitting of vintage pulp tropes with modern anxieties and modern technology. It might not dethrone, say, the Evil Dead or Spider-Man trilogies as anyone’s favorite Raimi production, but hopefully it’s the start of a late-period renaissance for a director now sufficiently endeared to Walt Disney to make a film with their money that’s identifiably his own.
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