Rating 7/10
Our story begins in the misery of corporate life. Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) is an awkward, overlooked employee at a consulting firm. She has been promised a long-awaited promotion. Instead, it is handed to a smug coworker (Xavier Samuel) after Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien), the son of the company’s late manager, takes over. Publicly humiliated and quietly sidelined, Linda is nonetheless asked to travel with her superiors on a business trip overseas. Mid-flight, disaster strikes. A violent plane crash leaves Linda and her boss, Bradley, as the only survivors. They’re washed ashore on a remote island and stripped of the office pecking order that once defined them.
Send Help initially seems like a familiar variation on a classic cinematic setup: two individuals stranded together, pushed into being close by circumstance. The balance of power flips immediately. Linda knows how to survive. Bradley does not. If this were a conventional picture, you might expect things to play out as Lina Wertmüller’s 1974 Italian adventure Swept Away. Two people who can’t stand each other are isolated until resentment gradually turns into attraction. Or Ruben Östlund’s wicked 2022 satire Triangle of Sadness, where social hierarchies implode, and the person with the least institutional authority suddenly becomes the alpha.
I kept thinking I knew where this account was going, only for my expectations to be upended at every turn. This is the latest from the splatter-happy mind of Sam Raimi, a filmmaker who has never had much interest in tenderness or moral balance. The pleasure of Send Help lies in how it subverts convention. It flirts with romantic comedy and even dangles the promise of social satire, but then pulls the rug out from under you. Knowing those earlier films almost becomes a liability, because Raimi samples familiar ingredients and then warps them into something far more vicious.
At its most basic, Send Help is about two incompatible personalities forced into an environment that strips away all civility. Linda keeps Bradley alive through her impressive survival skills. (Linda’s audition tape for the TV show Survivor is a source of amusement for her co-workers during that fateful plane trip.) Bradley oddly doesn’t welcome Linda’s care with the appreciation you’d expect, but with manipulation and cruelty. Their relationship is an escalating game of control. Food, water, shelter, affection, and punishment are all up for grabs. Each bid for control is more grotesque than the last. What starts as basic survival devolves into psychological warfare. It all descends into something closer to The War of the Roses. That is, if the movie were limited to a tropical island and upped the eye-popping gore. The chronicle zigs and zags so much with your emotions that you stop caring about these characters. It can get a bit exasperating, but Raimi commits so hard to the cartoonish shenanigans that I was ultimately beaten into accepting them.
The screenplay by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift initially teases the idea that Bradley Preston and Linda Liddle might fall in love. That concept is so laughable in hindsight. Nothing suggests either is capable of a tender relationship. Bradley is simply too nasty a human being, and Linda is far too unhinged. In the hands of accomplished actors like Dylan O’Brien and Rachel McAdams, the silliness is given some semblance of believability. What emerges is a gleefully ugly duel between two sparring partners determined to win at any cost. The narrative is really all over the place. It gets extremely messy, but the actors are fully game, and the film is constantly willing to go there. Send Help is pretty exhausting, but it’s strangely entertaining too. Buckle up, and enjoy the flight!
01-29-26