Intensity 🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Directed By Sam Raimi
Written by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift
Send Help is pure wicked entertainment. It borrows tropes from many genres. The ugly duckling turning into a swan. The horrible boss. Disaster survival. Obsession. All of these familiar elements are blended into something more than the sum of their parts. It’s funny, brutal, and puts both of its main characters through real ethical paces. Your rooting interests may shift over the course of the movie, but it ends with a cynical twist that turns into the perfect sunset. (Fist pump!)
The early buzz for this film was that it was Sam Raimi’s return to the world of Horror. Send Help is his first horror feature released since Drag Me to Hell in 2009. Raimi’s time away from the genre has helped him round out his story craft. Always excellent with comedy, he developed a knack for the natural tension of romantic comedy.
The Cast of Send Help
- Rachel McAdams plays Linda Liddle, a brilliant but socially awkward economic strategist working for a financial management company that is in the midst of executive succession. She is a big dreamer and a big fan of the television show, Survivor. (hint, hint)
- Dylan O’Brien plays Bradley Preston, the son and heir to the financial management company where Linda works. Linda has a crush on Bradley, but he barely knows who she is.
- Edyll Ismail plays Zuri, Bradley’s statuesque fiancée.
- Xavier Samuel plays Donovan Murphy, one of Linda’s co-workers who exploits Linda’s skills to promote himself. He is also Bradley’s fraternity brother.
- Dennis Haysbert plays Franklin, an executive at the company who is sympathetic to Linda and knows of her competence.
A Synopsis of Send Help
Linda Liddle is a skilled economic analyst who is, sadly, a loser. A loveable loser, perhaps, but she has very little self-awareness and atrocious social skills. She is trapped in her own social awkwardness. However, she is also a survivor. Her colleagues either ignore her or take advantage of her. It’s a terrible work environment, but the company’s president told her that, upon his retirement, she would be promoted to vice president. For a woman as bright as she is, she couldn’t see the lay of the land.
Bradley Preston has become the company’s CEO, and rather than giving Linda the title she earned, he has given it to his old buddy, Donovan. Donovan is a dick. He’s a bootlicker and a liar. But he is also charming and an old friend of Bradley’s. Bradley informs Linda that she lacks the charisma or chutzpah to be an executive at his company, but he does offer her an opportunity to prove herself. Travel with the executive team to Bangkok, and help develop the economic model. If it goes well, perhaps she can earn a top job. (He has no intent on delivering this promise.)
While on the company’s private jet, Bradley and his cronies delight in watching a video of Linda’s awkward tryout for Survivor. Call it a harbinger. The jet suffers an explosive engine failure, and a portion of the fuselage blows out. Donovan, in a desperate move, attempts to strangle Linda in the desire to claim her seat, but gets violently sucked out of the plane along with the rest of the entourage, except for Linda and Bradley.
On the Island
Linda manages to free herself from her seat before the plane sinks to the bottom of the sea. She floats to a nearby island, unconscious, and when she wakes, she finds Bradley and no other survivors. She is in her dream element, and immediately sets to creating shelter and finding food and water. Bradley has been maimed in the crash, but he does not yet appreciate Linda’s care and skills. He believes they are still in a boss and employee relationship, but clearly, the tables have turned. If Bradley is to survive, he will need to depend on her.
She proves her prowess by killing a savage boar, boosting her confidence, and providing them with a bounty to thrive, not just survive. Help is not coming, but she doesn’t mind. She has transformed, and as the days pass, Bradley grudgingly acknowledges her prowess. The relationship becomes cordial, and then friendly, on the verge of romantic. But Linda spots a boat, and keeps that secret to herself. Why spoil a good thing? Bradley is also masking his intent. He is desperate to get off the island, no matter what.
Betrayal becomes imminent. There will be backstabbing, but who will make the first move? How long can they play this charade? Tropical paradise? Not for these two. The knives will come out… literally.
An Evaluation of Send Help
This movie might not feel like a horror movie for the first two acts. There are a couple of thrilling sequences, namely the airplane crash and the boar fight, but though bloody and violent, it doesn’t quite reach the apex of horror. But then… the third act. This is largely a two-hander movie, with only two characters for the bulk of the film, and you marinate in this fun and complex relationship. The power dynamics ebb and flow, and you get joy and high anxiety from it. Watching Linda and Bradley scheme and then openly go to war with each other is exciting, funny, and even sad at times. It’s complicated.
There are also some top-tier Sam Raimi moments. Always a fan of a good vomiting sequence, the barfing moment in Send Help is one for the ages! When seen in a full theater, the laughter bounces off the wall as do the knowing groans. They’re showing off in this moment, and kudos to Rachel McAdams for her gastronomic purging efforts. Blllgglgllururrrgghhhh! That goes on for a satisfying five minutes.
McAdams and O’Brien are both in top form in this movie. Linda, in the first act, is truly pathetic. Yes, she’s been treated cruelly and unfairly at the office, but we all know someone like Linda. Everything about her screams’loser’. Her dress, her body language, her mannerisms, it’s a master class in dumbing down. McAdams invests in this character, and her metamorphosis is wondrous.
O’Brien also excels. I loved his adorable, earnest performance in Love and Monsters, and here he goes completely against that type. He walks the tightrope of being a total asshole, but walks it back to being a perfectly reasonable guy who wants to get back to his fiancée and life back home. Both characters move in and out of the grey zone between protagonist and antagonist, and your rooting interests may change throughout the film. In short, these characters make it a good time, even when they are both bleeding profusely.
Concluding Thoughts
This movie blends so many familiar stories and feels. Cast Away. Misery. The Devil Wears Prada. Ready or Not. Sweetheart. Lost. Lord of the Flies. And appropriately, Drag Me to Hell. And yet, it feels fresh. The writers Shannon and Swift understood how to play tug-of-war with the story. When you only have two characters, there needs to be some complexity and depth to the story, or it will feel like a pastiche, and this never does. We recognize the tropes, and sometimes the tropes pay off, and sometimes it’s a counter or a feint. That’s dramatic tension.
Come for the eventual bloodletting, but enjoy the comedy and drama along the way. This is the culmination of a veteran horror movie director who has learned from his experiences away from the genre and has crafted a popcorn crowd-pleaser with a wink and a grin. There are moments when hard decisions need to be made. Linda and Brandon, at times, are guessing right along with the audience as to whether to trust their instincts or if the situation calls for something more drastic. There are more than a couple of moments that push the characters into ethically dark places. Choices… choices… choices.
Send Help has finished its first run through the theaters, though it may still be in some Cineplexes, or in second-run theaters if you have them in your area. It is rated R for strong/bloody violence and language. (And a five-minute vomiting sequence.)
