Sam Raimi’s Lord Of The Files.
Sam Raimi has always possessed a particular knack for combining the grotesque with the giggles, and Send Help finds him in imperious mood, leaning into those instincts with the practiced ease of a man who knows exactly where the bodies – and the punchlines – need to be dropped.
After a suitably sleazy corporate preamble, Send Help deposits us on a remote island with two people who, in any other cinematic context, would be heavily favoured to become the latest in a long line of meet-cute castaway romances. But there’s nothing cute about Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien), a CEO whose charisma is entirely performative though his entitlement anything but, or Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams), an introverted but brilliant analyst with a penchant for the TV show Survivors or their situation. Washed ashore after a private plane crash, Raimi uses the hackneyed set-up for a viciously funny deconstruction of office politics and the human instinct for survival.
There’s a particular alchemy to Send Help, a blackly comedic refusal to soften either of the characters, leaving the audience to pick a side between two fundamentally unlikeable characters. Raimi and screenwriters Mark Swift and Damian Shannon do not attempt to soften the edges of Bradley’s narcissism or Linda’s cold opportunism to make them more palatable. Instead, it takes perverse delight in swinging the pendulum back and forth (certainly more towards Linda in the first act), losing momentum with each swing until it hangs indifferently between the two antagonists. Raimi leans into their friction, treating their mutual loathing as the primary engine for suspense as we increasingly stop rooting for them to survive the elements – or even reach some kind of rapprochement – and wait to see which one will finally snap and try to outlive the other. It’s a wonderful conceit: they’re not stranded on an island with only each other, they’re trapped there by each other, the politics of exploitation and self-interest laid bare like a Lord Of The Flies themed corporate retreat.
Rachel McAdams delivers a performance of jagged brilliance, shedding the natural warmth often associated with her previous roles to play Linda as a woman whose hobbyist survival instincts have been warped to a ruthless smugness by years of corporate subjugation. Linda bypasses the traditional trope of growth through adversity; her growing confidence metastasising into something more vengeful and cruel. Dylan O’Brien provides an excellent foil, playing Bradley with a hollow, frantic energy that highlights the character’s total lack of internal resources, yet clinging to the privileges his status usually accords him, wielding corporate jargon to negotiate with the environment, the display of a man whose only power has always relied on proximity to wealth. Their palpable chemistry, built on a cocktail of bile, bitterness and biting paranoia, constantly simmers on the brink of boiling over and Raimi captures their escalating madness with his signature visual kineticism. Diagonal shots, intrusive close-ups and, of course, his signature POV motion shots conspire to make the open tropical landscape feel increasingly claustrophobic.
While the film eventually descends into the kind of “Splatstick” violence that has often defined Raimi’s career, these moments function as punctuation marks for the thematic decay and a set-up for Send Help’s ultimate punchline. It is a cynical, sharp-toothed piece that flourishes through its refusal to offer easy redemption, proving that even the most unlikeable characters can be fascinating when viewed through a sufficiently twisted lens.
