Send Help marks Sam Raimi’s glorious return to horror after almost two decades away. The veteran director dabbled a bit with Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. That had horror elements, but it was certainly not a horror movie, and Raimi was more of a hired gun on that film anyway. Most importantly, it had Rachel McAdams, who returns here to reunite with Raimi and help deliver a fantastic time at the theater.
Send Help Review
Send Help is very much a two-hander. It’s got two main characters, with most of the side characters being totally stripped away by the time we hit the 30-minute mark or so. Rachel McAdams’ Linda Liddle and Dylan O’Brien’s Bradley Preston are the only two characters that we really interact with.
As such, it is absolutely vital for both of them to be at the top of their game. Fortunately, under Sam Raimi’s watchful eye, they are. McAdams is the lead here, and everything is pretty much from her point of view. Linda undergoes a fantastic transformation from beginning to end, and it’s wholly realized by McAdams’ all-in performance.
Linda is a well-meaning but slightly off-putting (through mostly no fault of her own) employee at a company that’s just undergone a father-to-son power exchange. The father promised Linda, who is really carrying the company on her back, a promotion, but the son is not interested.
He’d rather give the job to his golfing buddy, who has been coasting off Linda’s work for a while now. It’s such a frustratingly perfect look at business operations today. When Linda works up the nerve to confront Bradley and finds out what he really thinks (that she’s weird, ugly, and smells odd), he ends up inviting her on a trip to see if she can prove him wrong by solving an unsolvable problem.
Unbeknownst to her, Bradley’s just using her to help his buddy and new vice president get past this huge deal, but things go horribly awry. In one of the movie’s most cruel scenes, Bradley and his friends are laughing at a Survivor audition tape from Linda while she’s back in the plane trying to solve the problem facing them all.
A plane crash ensues, and the only survivors are Linda and Bradley, and Bradley is both wounded and totally out of his element. Did I mention Survivor? Yeah, Linda is prepared for this, and she takes care of Bradley and eventually takes the power in their relationship, but things continue to go totally off the rails.
O’Brien is deliciously vile and gets to really lean into the ugly parts of his character in a nice change for him. McAdams has to delicately balance the two sides of her character, with the latter, more confident side coming out on the deserted island. They’re both excellent, and they have pretty great chemistry.
The movie works really well on two fronts. Most obviously, it’s a scathing takedown of office politics. Raimi and scriptwriters Damian Shannon and Mark Swift paint an ugly portrait of the office before they even get on the plane, and everything works to illustrate just how awful it really is to have a job in this climate.
But on a secondary, more deeper level, Send Help is about power dynamics and how it can and will corrupt. Once Linda gets a little bit of power over Bradley, she goes feral for it, going to unreal lengths to keep it. By the end, she’s pretty much out of her mind. The balance of power teeters, but she works really hard to maintain it and put Bradley down.
She’s not quite as awful and unforgiving as Bradley was in the office setting, but it’s pretty clear she’s not quite able to handle power very well herself. Of course, we as an audience don’t care about that because it’s pretty awesome and well-deserved revenge that she’s dishing out.
Interestingly, Send Help doesn’t bother trying to make some big statement on the corruption that power brings. It’s clear that Linda is corrupted by it, but Raimi and company aren’t trying to indict her for it. There’s no reckoning for her, perhaps subtly displaying how there was no and would not have been a reckoning for Bradley.
This film has all the Raimi trappings, sometimes for better and worse. Raimi’s campy editing style is in full force, but it really works well in some scenes. The goofy effects come into play as well. Sometimes they look hilarious, and other times they’re a little jarring. The over-the-top blood can also be a bit much at times.
But ultimately, his style really works here. There are some unfathomably good close-up shots that I suspect will be some of the funniest of the year when it’s all said and done. Send Help is pretty subdued compared to his earlier horror works, which is probably for the best. It’s never too gory, never too campy, and never too scary. It works itself into a nice concoction of all the elements.
Conclusion
Send Help is very funny, with Dylan O’Brien doing a lot of fantastic work with his body and facial expressions to drive home the humor. Rachel McAdams’ line deliveries were pretty hilarious, too. It’s scary in spurts, although there were two major jump scares that totally got me. All in all, it’s a really good time in the theater, which is almost never true in January.
Score: 4/5
