Send Help

While it seemingly borrows from any number of sources — Misery, Office Killer, Cast Away, Yellowjackets, and Triangle of Sadness immediately leap to mind — Send Help becomes its own unique, mischievous, horrifying creation, thanks to director Sam Raimi and his singular gift for eliciting laughter that turns into screaming (and vice versa).

And once the movie becomes a two-hander, it provides meaty, unpredictable characters for Rachel McAdams, an actress whose choice of roles always reveals something new and surprising, and Dylan O’Brien, fresh off of Twinless, the film that made it clear that this one-time teen idol possesses impressive dramatic and comedic chops.

The actors spend Send Help at odds with each other, embodying the Survivor motto of “Outwit, Outplay, Outlast.” Survivor, it happens, is the favorite show of Linda Liddell (McAdams), a mousy numbers-cruncher at a huge corporation; she’s the kind of awkward nerd that no one wants to have lunch with, but she’s also the brains of the operation, keeping everything afloat through her mathematical acumen. That skill in accounting — Planning and Strategy, to be specific — led the company’s previous CEO to promise her a promotion to VP, but when he dies and his callow son Bradley (O’Brien) takes over, the new boss plans to promote his frat bro and golf buddy instead.

On a business trip to Bangkok, the corporate jet crashes, leaving Linda and Bradley as the sole survivors. For Linda, whose apartment is full of books about surviving in the wilderness, this disaster represents a unique opportunity to let her skills shine; Bradley, of course, assumes he can continue to push Linda around under these new circumstances, but after she lets him fend for himself for a day, he quickly realizes the power dynamic has shifted.

But will Bradley really give up his alpha status that easily? And will Linda extend any effort toward getting rescued when it will mean returning to her lowly status back at the office? Screenwriters Damian Shannon and Mark Swift (whose last credit was the wretched Baywatch movie) continually toy with audience expectation; viewers might initially sympathize with poor Linda’s plight while finding Bradley to be an irredeemable corporate monster, but those initial impressions don’t necessarily last. The film’s willingness to allow both of its protagonists to be villainous underscores a real critique of Survivor and, beyond that, capitalism in general: it’s not enough just to win, you also have to destroy the competition.

Raimi plays around with convention here, from Danny Elfman’s score (with its occasional swells of seafaring adventure) to the transformation of McAdams from dork with tuna salad on her chin to flowy-haired queen of the elements, following in the footsteps of Katharine Hepburn (The African Queen) and Kathleen Turner (Romancing the Stone), among many. With O’Brien accurately nailing the entitled exec who inherited a business but thinks he built it himself, the stage is set for a variety of genres, from survival drama to mismatched-partners rom-com. But it’s a Raimi movie, which means viewers get to squirm over moments like a character simultaneously administering CPR and projectile vomiting.

It’s pivots like that one that make the film so entertaining — in one scene, Linda might wind up covered in blood after singlehandedly hunting down and killing a wild boar, and in the next, she and Bradley are stuffing their faces with pork and laughing over a bonfire. The trademark Raimi moments deliver the outrageous blend of horror and hilarity viewers have come to expect, but those moments tend to arrive at completely unpredictable moments.

Send Help requires a certain amount of disbelief — don’t pay too much attention to the length of O’Brien’s beard, given how long they’ve been castaways — but its wisest strategy lies in never making it clear which of the two will come out on top. As Survivor has proven over the years, that’s the best way to keep people glued to the screen.

Director: Sam Raimi
Screenwriters: Damian Shannon & Mark Swift
Cast: Rachel McAdams, Dylan O’Brien, Edyll Ismail, Xavier Samuel, Chris Pang, Dennis Haysbert, Thaneth Warakulnukroh, Emma Raimi
Producers: Sam Raimi, Zainab Azizi
Executive producer: JJ Hook
Director of photography: Bill Pope
Production design: Ian Gracie
Editing: Bob Murawski
Music: Danny Elfman
Sound design: Jussi Tegelman, supervising sound editor; Nick Emond, production sound mixer
Production companies: 20th Century Studios
In English
113 minutes