Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) is a tragic fussbudget who brings stinky tuna sandwiches to the office, has a pair of lucky shoes (also stinky) and lives alone with her pet budgerigar with whom she shares her morning toast. She is also a dedicated, decisive, diligent – the one person who is keeping her corporate accounting firm afloat by actually knuckling down and doing the work. Unlike the slick-haired bros who exploit Linda and leach off of her sense of eternal willing.
Her new boss, Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien), is a jackal with an immaculately trimmed beard whose first order of business is to tell Linda to her face that she should not expect a promised promotion any time soon as her “type” (as in, an older woman who is not willing to put out for clout) is not considered boardroom material. Luckily for Linda, she’s asked to join the bro squad on a business trip to Bangkok and their private jet just kinda explodes, resulting in entertainingly gory deaths for the underlings, and Linda and Bradley stranded on a pristine desert island in south-east Asia. Supplies are sparse, comms are down, and the tables are well and truly turned as Linda also happens to be obsessed with the reality TV perennial, Survivor, and is able to hold her own and then some in these forbidding climes. Bradley is now her bitch.
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Send Help sees veteran director Sam Raimi returning to his horror-adjacent roots for this first work based on an original IP since 2009 indie humdinger, Drag Me to Hell. It’s an absolute hoot, made possible by the sublime and intuitive chemistry between two leads who are clearly willing to go all the way to the edge for their director. O’Brien brings an undertow of steely pathos to the overwhelmingly vile and self-serving Bradley, whose entitled silver spoon existence is now coming back to bite him on the ass. His maniacal cackle would even make Bruce Campbell proud. McAdams, meanwhile, is a malevolent delight as Linda, smiley, empathetic, caring, but will definitely consider relieving a man of his sexual organs if he crosses her.
In terms of describing the intricacies of Linda’s character, some have referenced Kathy Bates’ kneecap-hammering obsessive Annie Wilkes in Rob Reiner’s famed Stephen King adaptation, Misery. Yet that feels a little off, particularly due to the way that Raimi and scriptwriters Damian Shannon and Mark Swift toy with affections and try to present the situation from the vantage of both characters. There’s a satisfying objectivity to the film, and both Linda and Bradley make for authentic and unapologetic products of their professional and personal lives before the crash. All of which is to say, Linda is not the baddie – but neither, perhaps, is Bradley.
Raimi uses Send Help as an opportunity to flex his patented formal dynamism, and while the camera is a little more sedate than the elasticised excesses of films like Evil Dead II or the underrated Darkman, he’s still a master of of using movement and framing to create emphasis and draw us closer to the characters and their heightened emotions. Fans of the director will be able to lavish in all the subtle call-backs and trademarks (including much eye-watering violence), while everyone else will be left to lavish in a film which has more to trenchant insight into gender wars, corporate culture clashes and the scourge of capitalism than a film like Ruben Östlund’s self-satisfied bloatfest, Triangle of Sadness.