A spiritual cousin to 2009’s financial crisis-set Drag Me to Hell, the new film Send Help announces the much anticipated return of Sam Raimi, horror filmmaker extraordinaire and certified sicko. Having worked infrequently over the past two decades — the Dark Man director has only made two feature films since 2013, both quasi-anonymous IP plays that felt like a filmmaker trying to get along to go along in the industry — Raimi is back with an original, R-rated genre film with all the attendant slapstick violence, baroque camerawork, and buckets of blood and other bodily fluids one would hope for. A high-concept two-hander that finds a mousey office drone and amateur survivalist (Rachel McAdams) and her entitled nepo-baby boss (Dylan O’Brien) stranded together on a deserted island, Send Help uses its fanciful setting to ostensibly interrogate office politics and shifting power dynamics, and to offer a pointed assessment of what makes someone genuinely valuable in a situation where a trust fund is useless. And while the film’s commentary on class warfare and inverted gender roles tends a little toward the facile — and will feel especially familiar to anyone who’s seen Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness — the film benefits enormously from two leads willing to enthusiastically embrace the nihilism of the material and give themselves over to Raimi’s patented brand of impish malevolence.
McAdams stars as Linda, a diligent but dowdy cubicle jockey at a nondescript transnational company, toiling away for seven years in the hope of being promoted to Vice President all while making her mostly younger male bosses look good. A socially awkward widow in her 40s who lives alone with her pet bird and aspires to someday be a contestant on the TV show Survivor — a regrettable bit of cross-media promotion that still effectively lays the groundwork for the character’s unique set of skills — Linda had been promised career advancement in recognition of her stellar work by the company’s late CEO. Unfortunately, his unctuous son, Bradley (O’Brien), who’s taken over the company, would rather promote one of his former fraternity buddies who looks the part and has a shared interest in snark, leering, and hitting the golf course. Hoping to squeeze a little more value out of her before shipping her off to metaphorical Siberia, Bradley invites Linda onto his chartered jet for a corporate trip to Bangkok where her unshowy professionalism stands out in stark contrast to all the pampered, backslapping bros.
But when the jet experiences engine trouble mid-flight, causing it to split apart before plummeting into the Indian Ocean (in a sequence that straddles the line between ultra-harrowing immediacy and Raimi’s preferred kind of cartoonish excess), a terrified Linda is thrust into the elements… which also happens to be “her element.” Linda frees herself from the fuselage, drifts ashore to a small tropical island, and sets about building a fire and shelter. But she quickly discovers she’s not alone: an unconscious, seriously injured Bradley has also washed up onto the beach, requiring Linda to nurse him back to health. Initially appreciative of Linda having saved his life — not to mention foraging for fruit, catching fish, and collecting rain water for them to subsist on — Bradley begins to bristle at what he perceives as Linda’s lack of urgency in getting them off the island. Falling back into the habit of trying to throw his weight around by threatening her employment, Bradley finds in Linda a woman liberated by exiting civilization and not above being spiteful herself. In a battle of wills where only one person is capable of providing, and Linda increasingly signaling her desire to never be rescued, Bradley silently stews and schemes; contemplating how he might rid himself of his hyper-competent employee while recognizing the only way he can survive is through her largesse. The entire film, then, becomes a play on the old adage: “can’t live with her, can’t live without her.”
It’s here we should address the elephant in the room: casting Rachel McAdams as a frump is rather absurd. The actress is no longer the 20-something starlet who burst onto the scene in Mean Girls and The Notebook, but she remains, objectively, one of the most beautiful women on the planet and there’s not enough suspension of disbelief in the world to pretend otherwise. Still, the film has quite a bit of fun trying: costuming the character in drab earth tones and clunky shoes while Raimi and his longtime DP Bill Pope try to invent unflattering angles from which to shoot the actress’s face (the mole on her left cheek has never been more prominent than it is here). McAdams does her bit by emphasizing the character’s clamminess and emotional neediness while demonstrating an eagerness to please that’s innately repellant (ever the trooper, she also performs a key scene with a giant gob of tuna salad on the corner of her mouth). But that’s also part of the magic trick of the film: McAdams’ performance starts to feel more luminous after she arrives on the island, where her lighting improves, her costuming becomes more revealing, and the character’s competency under pressure is brought to the fore. There’s an almost glossy, wish-fulfilment component to the whole scenario — niceties like “how do Linda’s legs and underarms stay so Nair smooth over the course of weeks and months?” are understandably elided — that compliments the film’s picturesque, Thailand-filmed island scenes. But it’s also important for the evolution of the character and, more importantly, for rationalizing some of the truly reprehensible things Linda does so that we’re able to view the island as less a prison than paradise itself. One worth killing for in order to preserve.
The script by Mark Swift and Damian Shannon is attempting something tonally tricky here with regards to complicating our empathy for the characters. Bradley is undeniably a chauvinist and a lout who takes Linda for granted, even after she tends to his wounds and keeps his belly full. And yet the film is clear-eyed about Linda’s confused allegiances and the sort of monstrous behavior required to bend reality to her will or keep Bradley compliant (the film nods at one-upping the most upsetting scene from Misery only to pull its punches at the last minute in order to keep Linda just this side of sympathetic). Bradley may be a slimy asshole, but he’s not wrong for wanting to get home to his beautiful fiancée (Edyll Ismail) or the business empire he inherited, and that puts him in direct conflict with Linda. At the same time, we’re asked to take Linda’s actions entirely on faith; the film almost certainly needed to go deeper in exploring the burgeoning psychosis that starts to govern her behavior for any of it to play as credible. Send Help‘s psychology is unfortunately pretty pat in this regard, and Linda’s objectives never evolve beyond the short-term thrill of reigning as queen of the island. Presumably playing Robinson Crusoe will lose some of its luster once she has need for antibiotics or when monsoon season hits. And then there’s the coyness about the sexual tension between the characters, with Raimi’s film waffling between Linda being infatuated with her mercurial but handsome employer — sneaking furtive glances at Bradley as he bathes in the ocean and getting him drunk on homemade wine — and threatening to literally castrate him for defying her. In truth, the film can’t quite decide whether Bradley is intrinsic to Linda’s fantasy or an impediment to it, making it challenging to follow the character’s motivations.
Perhaps the best way to appreciate Send Help, then, is as a half-speed Evil Dead film. There are no cursed books, rapey trees, or disembodied spirits roaming the woods, although Raimi does employ his famed “shaky cam” to convey the POV of a wild boar. Nevertheless, the characters are beset by a homicidal mania that finds them at each other’s throats, being menaced by shrieking, wild-eyed, animatronic creatures — the aforementioned boar — and by film’s end both McAdams and O’Brien are covered head to toe in blood and grime. Raimi’s gift for using film grammar to build gags remains as sharp as ever (e.g., using a series of continuous lateral pans across O’Brien’s face to convey the passage of time as well as his mounting desperation), and he’s not above goosing the audience with a well-placed jump scare. After feeling a little hemmed-in by the intractable constraints and family-friendly ratings of Oz the Great and Powerful and a Doctor Strange sequel, it’s perversely endearing to watch Raimi back on familiar ground, putting his actors through the paces by having them throwing one another around like ragdolls and having assorted foul substances puked back into their mouths. Send Help is gleefully repulsive at times and engages in a Looney Tunes-inspired misanthropy that few filmmakers could realistically pull off, but it’s all squarely in Raimi’s comfort zone (you can practically hear the director cackling offscreen at, say, having O’Brien dig his thumb so deep into McAdams skull that her eye starts to bulge out of its socket). After wandering the wilderness himself for a number of years, it’s a profound comfort to have Raimi back doing what he does best.
DIRECTOR: Sam Raimi; CAST: Rachel McAdams, Dylan O’Brien, Edyll Ismail, Dennis Haysbert; DISTRIBUTOR: 20th Century Studios; IN THEATERS: January 30; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 53 min.
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