Fabled for (among other things) The Evil Dead, Darkman and Spider-Man, Sam Raimi made his last appearance as a director on 2022’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which was one of the biggest hits of his career. Designed on a slightly smaller scale, Send Help may not overtake it commercially, but it mixes horror and black comedy with a castaway-survival theme to devastatingly entertaining effect. The twin leads, Rachel McAdams and Dylan O'Brien, squeeze maximum mileage from their contrasting roles.
Our story centres on Linda Liddle (McAdams), who works in the Strategy and Planning department of a financial management company. Ms Liddle is hugely competent and can whizz round a spreadsheet with ease, and had been promised a promotion to vice-president by her former boss, but now his son Bradley (O’Brien) has taken over the company. An arrogant, entitled bully, Bradley is disgusted by Linda’s extreme dowdiness (shapeless sweater, frumpy skirt, tragic shoes) and has decided to promote his good buddy Donovan Murphy (Xavier Samuel) instead. Bradley and the smirkingly self-regarding Donovan make a beautiful couple, almost as picture-perfect as Bradley with his supermodel-esque fiancee, Zuri (Edyll Ismail).
When she joins the company management on a flight to Bangkok to finalise a business merger, Linda’s humiliation is compounded when she catches the boys mocking her clumsy audition tape for the Survivor TV show. But suddenly their executive jet is rocked by violent explosions, and hurtles in flames towards the ocean below (though not without a few deliciously barbed visual jokes on the way down). When the chaos and confusion clears, we find Bradley and Linda washed up on a desert island somewhere in the Gulf of Thailand, the only survivors of the disaster. Poor Donovan didn’t make it.
Self-help is the order of the day, and Linda the aspiring survivalist finds herself in her element. She’s briskly scouring the island for edible fruits, berries and shellfish, and swiftly erects a shelter from palm-fronds, vines and bamboo. Her joy when she manages to create fire by rubbing sticks together is irresistibly infectious. Meanwhile, Bradley lies slumped under a tree with an injured leg, which Linda tends as best she can. However, Bradley is boorish and ungrateful, and still expects to order her around as if they’re back in the office.
But the world is suddenly different, and the shoe is emphatically on the other foot. Bradley can only grumble and pout while Linda maps out the landscape and creates remarkable superchef-esque meals from an array of scavenged ingredients. There’s a show-stopping scene where she kills a wild boar, Raimi neatly sidestepping any animal-welfare qualms by making the beast a fang-baring, slasher-flick monster. Meanwhile, with Bradley’s uselessness humiliatingly apparent, Linda is liberated from her former mousiness, with tumbling island-girl curls and a laid-back “natural woman” vibe.
Indeed, it seems that Linda has found her personal paradise, though inevitably civilisation begins to encroach eventually. Zuri makes a reappearance, for instance, though she unwittingly provides Raimi with a pretext for further macabre jocularity. The director (with screenwriters Damian Shannon and Mark Swift) has also concocted a handbrake-turn late twist, which gives the entire scenario a violent shake and sets up a delightfully satisfying conclusion.
Interestingly, Raimi was originally going to make Send Help for Sony, but walked away when they proposed to release it exclusively on streaming services. He wanted a cinema release, for the audience interaction it entails, and got his wish when Twentieth Century Studios picked it up. Good call.
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