Sam Raimi continues his brilliant horror tricks on a deserted island.
“Send Help” is almost like a better version of what Guy Ritchie was trying to do when he remade “Swept Away” in the role reversal scenario. Except this isn’t a romance odyssey. It’s a horror movie that twists and turns our emotions, and has us a little conflicted on who exactly to root for. Which of these two people deserve to survive on the island? The hardworking employee who might be seen a meek woman and wanting the opportunity to seize the upper hand or the jerky, sexist boss who thinks he’s better than her?
And being a Raimi horror film, you’re guaranteed a lot of gore and violence, as well as the twisted nature of it all. And setting it on a deserted island couldn’t be more ideal and more sinister. After all, the fat kid Piggy got killed by a boulder in “Lord of the Flies.”
Rachel McAdams plays Linda Liddle, a dorky would-be “Survivor” contestant and employee in a company’s Planning and Strategy Department, who is mistreated by her male colleagues, starting with the self-congratulatory Donovan (Xavier Samuel) and ending with the new sexist CEO Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien). His late father promised Linda a promotion as V.P. after all her dedicated years, but he offers it to Donovan, unless she can convince him otherwise on a business trip to Bangkok.
En route, however, their plane gets attacked in a storm that kills most of the pilots and passengers, including Donovan, but sparing Linda and Bradley and drifting them to the nearest island. This is when it basically becomes a splice between “Lord of the Flies” and “Swept Away,” as the tables are turned on them. Since she has the know how to building shelter and harvesting food and since he’s recovering from an injured leg and he lived the life of dining out, she makes herself the self-appointed boss of him.
Linda doesn’t want anyone to find them yet or maybe not at all, so she can continue to have the upper hand. It’s funny, because I was thinking about “Triangle of Sadness” when the housekeeper Abigail played by Dolly de Leon became the leader of survivors and was contemplating killing her new friend when they finally found help. I bet Linda and Abigail would make good BFFs at this rate.
You can tell when “Send Help” wants to go all Raimi on us, when Linda kills a CGI boar and gets its blood and snot all over her, and when she’s caught in a dream sequence with ghosts and jumpscares, and when the two survivors start attacking each other. You can already tell by the trailer and poster that it’s far from an unexpected love story between them, although the centerpiece likes to screw with us about that. And it also likes to screw with us a bit on the torture porn genre, when she threatens to cut Bradley’s testicles. Again, I think you can tell she’s about to do something drastic by the trailer.
“Send Help” is Raimi’s first directing job since “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” (which also had McAdams), and he guides McAdams and O’Brien with daring, insanely provocative, and sometimes wickedly funny consistency. In fact, in an allegorical sense, it could be labeled a comedy. The audience had their laughs, and McAdams can specialize in the genre, as wisely demonstrated in “Mean Girls” and “Game Night” (and apparently the dreadful “Hot Chick” was her first major role). And it chooses blood as the gross joke in a wiser fashion than how Brandy and Kathryn Hunter choose poop jokes in “The Front Room.”
I was a little uncomfortable with a few things (especially the “fixing” scene), but mostly, I was entertained and delighted by the film’s demented nature. I know Raimi honors his own horror roots, I’ve seen “Evil Dead” and “Drag Me to Hell” in this genre, I met him at Galaxy Con a few summers ago, and “Send Help” is another worthy addition.
I guess, in this case, you could ask: “If you were stranded on a desert island and can only bring one item, what would you bring?”
My answer: “Probably my pocket knife.”
