‘Send Help’ Needs No Bloody Assistance

Sam Raimi is one of more colorful horror directors you’ll encounter, and not just in the rainbow of varying bodily slimes dripping from his body of work. Long before the internet connected moviemakers to fans, he was injecting meta-humor into over-the-top massacres like Army of Darkness. It’s no surprise this quality found him tapped for superhero adaptations like the astonishing, pre-MCU Spider-Man 2 that balanced unexpected emotional moments and sudden laughs with blowing shit up. Raimi’s horror hasn’t punched quite that high — not enough heart is a built-in genre limitation — but in Send Help it’s great to see someone catering to so many appetites and getting them right.

Horror has its own advantages — breakneck surprises for one thing. Send Help uses speed to its advantage, and Rachel McAdams — as good as she’s ever been as dowdied-up Survivor devotee Linda Liddle — matches the rollercoaster pacing with authority.

Send Help ★★★ (3/5 stars)
Directed by: Sam Raimi
Written by: Damian Shannon and Mark Swift
Starring: Rachel McAdams, Dylan O’Brien, Edyll Ismail, Xavier Samuel, Chris Pang, Dennis Haysbert
Running time: 115 mins

Send Help caricatures the extreme differences between its two leads, Linda and her new boss Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien), to instantly move the plot into action. Liddle’s penchant for tuna-on-wheat plays a bigger part than an audience might expect and both her eating and dressing habits irritate her more sartorial officemates. An archetypal frat bro, O’Brien’s nepo-CEO character minces no words in explaining why she was passed over for a long-expected promotion in favor of a Patrick Bateman type who’s only worked there for months. (You see, he golfs.) He finds her “disgusting.”

As a goodwill gesture explicitly intended to be hollow, Preston invites her along for a Bangkok business trip on the company jet, without ceasing his or the other employees’ ridicule of her. Indeed, their final act is mocking her Survivor audition tape before the plane unexpectedly goes down in a blizzard of impressively frightening CGI hail, sucking everyone but Liddle and Preston out the hole blown in the side.

From there the movie becomes Misery Island, with McAdams an uncanny amalgam of Christina Ricci’s Yellowjackets character Misty Quigley and Kathy Bates’ most famous role. Liddle and Quigley share an overeager interest in survival that doubles as a desire to prove their mettle socially. Liddle even tends to Bradley’s injured leg just as Quigley does for Coach Ben on her show. Unlike Quigley, who eventually becomes a sort of anti-hero, McAdams never plays the character to be liked. Send Help’s audience is meant to both sympathize with Linda and dread being in a social situation with her. You don’t have to like people to recognize the injustice of the world mistreating her.

What’s notable is not how Send Help subverts or bucks familiar expectations, but wriggles tantalizingly inside of them. You pretty much know what’s going to happen from the beginning, and yet the movie is deft with its fake-outs, shifting the power balance between Liddle and Preston. In one dialogue, the film even presents a welcome emotional gravitas that seemed beyond these intentionally two-dimensional characters.

That dialogue does set off a chain reaction where they take turns poisoning each other and the power dynamic mixed with a weird love-hate sexual dynamic makes for a BDSM element as the adept Linda patiently tries to show Bradley he’s no longer boss now that they’re stranded on the gulf of Thailand. For his part, denying his role as gimp, he pathetically tries to fire her while being barely able to build shelter or gather water for himself. His inability to remember  Linda’s actual job title ends up being a fatal flaw.

There’s nothing groundbreaking about throwing opposites together in an isolated, dangerous system and watching what happens. Likewise nothing so new in a couple of people flirting with a crush that neither of them trusts, or even that they eventually try to kill each other, but McAdams’ gusto for her part is aces, and O’Brien’s a suitable manchild asshole for a foil.

The real innovation is in Raimi’s close-up gross-outs just like in the gut-busting Drag Me to Hell — one of the big laughs is when Linda keeps puking green onto Bradley’s face while trying to rescue him. Raimi still loves popping eyeballs, phlegm dripping from mouths, and big squelching set pieces: one scene has a highly unrealistically rendered wild boar that just keeps on spurting blood. Send Help works as a revenge-on-sexism underdog tale, while probing some genuine trust issues in its characters and taking advantage of them with horror and hilarity.