Send Help
Director Sam Raimi offers his signature mix of puckish irony, relatable characters and over-the-top bursts of gore in this tale of an office drone who crash-lands on an island with her a-hole boss.
Sam Raimi certainly has one of the most peculiar sensibilities in mainstream movie-making. Who else has a filmography that includes blood-spurting horror (“The Evil Dead”), superhero movies (the first Spider-man trilogy, among others), humanist dramas (“A Simple Plan”) and revisionist fantasy (“Oz the Great and Powerful”)?
His signature mix is vibrant, relatable characters caught in highly ironic contests of wills, often interrupted by sudden bursts of over-the-top gore. Most observers would say horror is home base, but I think he likes to poke the audience with black humor as much as shock them with violent scares.
There’s heaping helpings of both in “Send Help,” the tale of a harried office drone (Rachel McAdams) who crash-lands on a deserted island with her a-hole boss (Dylan O’Brien), a thoroughly despicable tech bro who inherited his company from his dad and treats her like dirt.
They spend most of the movie navigating a suddenly upended relationship where much of the power shifts to her, resulting in rising tensions and resentment. Because it’s a Sam Raimi movie, at some point their grudge will turn stabby.
I appreciated the many shifts in tone and unexpected plot turns (screenplay by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift). Just as the dynamic of CEO and flunky gets inverted, so do our expectations about what will happen and who exactly these people really are.
In a conventional movie, we would be nudged to hold maximum sympathy for Linda Liddle, a sweet but awkward manager in the strategy and planning department of a major international firm. She’s 40ish and single, dresses in baggy shades of mud and is one of those people who’s just socially bumbling. Linda eats tuna fish sandwiches at her desk, scrunches up her face into weird, pained expressions and is the employee others tend to avoid.
Correspondingly, we’re pushed to instantly hate Bradley Preston (O’Brien), a silver spoon type who waltzes into the office, thinking he knows everything about a business he’s barely acquainted with. He takes an instant dislike to Linda, largely because of her frumpy ways, and passes her over for the promotion she’d been promised by his pops.
There’s a distinct chauvinism to his machinations, surrounding himself with similarly snotty dudes who barely do any work and lord it over the workhorses like Linda. Bradley wants to can her right away, but needs her expertise to navigate a merger with a Bangkok company. On the flight there, they even dig up and snigger over her audition video for the TV show “Survivor,” something she’s spent years practicing for.
After the crash, though, Linda’s skills come in very handy. Bradley has his leg torn up, so he’s basically a helpless babe for awhile. Linda quickly builds a shelter, makes fire, scrounges up water and food and nurses him back to health. She even knows which plants are tasty and which are poisonous.
Bradley tries to reassert his authority, and Linda demonstrates her independence by simply walking away, abandoning him for a day or two until he’s nearly dead from thirst and exposure. Eventually, she comes back and they embark on a new little enterprise in which she’s the one in charge.
This setup sounds distinctly similar to “Triangle of Sadness” from a few years ago, where a bunch of rich jerks find themselves beholden to the servant they’d kicked around before they land on the island.
I’ll leave it to you to discover what happens during the rest of their stay, other than to say things both go in ways we expect and ways we don’t. For example, after some time has passed and their hope of rescue fades, their animosity fades into something like a partnership, with even a hint of attraction.
McAdams and O’Brien share a great scene where they finally let down their guards over a campfire lubricated with some homemade hooch, and they each learn there’s a darkness and a hard core to the other that’s been kept hidden.
It’s a fine performance from McAdams, creating a character with a lot push and pull to her. Linda is someone who’s used to being dumped on, but everybody reaches their breaking point. Part of her doesn’t actually want to leave the island, feeling like she’s finally started to blossom like a flower finally seeing the sun — while Bradley sees her paradise as a hell he needs to escape.
There’s also a subtle shift where we begin to suspect that Linda maybe isn’t the total guileless naïf we’ve supposed… possibly even with a dash of Annie Wilkes kookery from “Misery.”
There’s some biting satire here about our workplace and society at large today, where the privileged don’t even bother to acknowledge it and those stuck in the trenches look up with envy and growing hatred. Having been both at the bottom and near the top, I can tell you there’s a mutual blindness.
“Send Help” is a smart and subtle flick. It looks like a typical dramatic thriller, but there’s a sharp bite and a sly wink that elevates the material.