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IMAGINE CASTAWAY WITH A DEVIOUS NEPO BABY taking the place of the decaying volleyball Wilson and add in director Sam Raimi’s fondness of explosive bodily fluids and you get some sense of where Send Help is coming from. It’s part survival thriller, part corporate satire, and part war of the sexes, alternately amusing and thrilling, occasionally a little gross, and entirely fun.
Rachel McAdams stars as Linda Little, a hypercompetent but mousey corporate drone who was promised a vice presidency by the recently departed head of the company. Dylan O’Brien plays Bradley Preston, the dead founder’s incompetent boob of a son and aforementioned Wilson stand-in, who finds Linda annoying because she’s, well, kind of a dork. Doesn’t dress well. Talks to him with food on her face. Isn’t hot enough to hit on or suave enough to close a deal. But too important to fire outright.
Bradley invites Linda on a business trip to Bangkok with his bros; when they watch her tryout video for Survivor, they all crack up, causing her to sink into her chair. But she’ll have the last laugh, putting her hobby to great use on a deserted island somewhere off the coast of Thailand. She collects water, builds shelter, kills boars, collects fruits, even brews some prison wine. He whines and plots and hopes to flee the first chance he gets.
Flee to where, though? If I have a complaint about this film, it’s that it fundamentally misunderstands the nature of a person like Bradley. His sort is not simply imperious and demanding: he’s a born user, a master manipulator. We see some of that here, for sure—he understands Linda has a crush on him and is happy to use that to his advantage—but he spends so much of the film trying to figure out how to head back into the open water that I can’t help but wonder if he has volleyball-stuffing for brains like his Castaway counterpart. Where’s he going to go anyway?
Still, you accept a bit of silliness in the characterization because it creates a very real tension for Raimi to exploit. And you like to see Raimi exploit these things because there are few who are allowed to do it quite like he does. This movie isn’t quite as stylistically aggressive as some of his work—there aren’t repeated Dutch-angle zooms à la The Quick and the Dead, or the herky-jerky movements of his Evil Dead films or the delightfully nasty Drag Me to Hell—but the Raimisms are there nonetheless.
Very few directors would zoom in to a glob of tuna fish to simulate Bradley’s visual and aural distaste for Linda’s appearance, and I can’t think of another director more in love with having characters vomit on each other, getting sputum right into each other’s mouths. Lots of directors enjoy playing with blood, but few do so as viscerally as Raimi; you get the sense he never quite grew out of that kid in Michigan trying to figure out how to make Bruce Campbell look like a used tourniquet rag.
And, ultimately, this is why Send Help is so much fun to watch. It’s been ages since Raimi has been let off his chain to torment actors and audiences alike. Yes, yes: Oz the Great and Powerful and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness are very much “Sam Raimi films,” bearing his stylistic hallmarks and genuine quirkiness. But they’re also very much big, expensive pieces of corporate intellectual property management, efforts to either start or perpetuate huge filmmaking endeavors.
Here, 20th Century Studios is letting him do something we haven’t seen since 2009’s Drag Me to Hell. While I don’t think this new movie is quite as good as that effort—Send Help could’ve stood to be just a skoosh more skeptical of Linda Little—it’s just nice to have Raimi properly back in the saddle. He didn’t even have to direct a puff piece about the first lady as a favor to a studio chief to get back on his horse. Imagine that.