Send Help

The Corporate Ladder Ends at the Beach

It’s been exactly seventeen years since Sam Raimi last dragged us to hell, and frankly, I was starting to worry the man had mellowed. Spending a decade inside the sterile machinery of superhero franchise filmmaking will do that to a director. You start to forget the tactile, sticky, deeply undignified grossness of physical bodies in peril. But within the first fifteen minutes of *Send Help*, any fear of Raimi going soft is washed away in a tidal wave of corporate awkwardness, bodily fluids, and pure, gleeful sadism. (And thank God for it.)



The setup sounds like a discarded pitch for a CBS sitcom. Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) is a brilliant, entirely unappreciated strategy planner who gets passed over for a promised promotion. The job goes to one of the golf buddies of her new CEO, Bradley Preston (Dylan O'Brien), an insufferable nepo baby who just inherited the company. He hates her frumpy sweaters; she hates his unearned arrogance. They end up on a corporate trip to Bangkok to finalize a merger. The plane crashes. Suddenly, the two of them are the only survivors on an uncharted island in the Gulf of Thailand. There’s a catch, though. Bradley is injured and completely helpless without his platinum card. Linda, it turns out, is an obsessive fan of the reality show *Survivor*.



This could easily have been a straightforward, moralistic revenge fantasy. A lesser filmmaker would have let Linda righteously dominate her tormentor while we cheered from the cheap seats. Raimi isn't interested in that kind of clean catharsis. Instead, he turns the island into an arena for the kind of escalating, Three Stooges-esque physical punishment he perfected back in the 1980s. As Jeannette Catsoulis of The New York Times aptly put it, the movie is "Raimi at his most gleeful and twisted." But what makes it work isn't just the blood—it's the way the camera functions as an active, mocking participant. Early in the movie, the lens awkwardly fixates on a smudge of tuna salad on Linda's face while she tries to introduce herself to Bradley. It's excruciating. Later, that same kinetic camera work captures her cramming a sandwich into her mouth before hastily hiding it in a desk drawer. By the time they hit the sand, that visual indignity shifts entirely onto Bradley.



I’m still thinking about what McAdams does here with her posture. We are so used to seeing her as the radiant center of a frame, often playing the sharpest person in the room. Here, she shrinks. Her shoulders slouch, her neck disappears into terrible cardigans, and she moves with the erratic energy of someone who is perpetually apologizing for taking up oxygen. But watch the physical transformation once she builds her first fire. The spine straightens. The voice drops an octave. It’s a completely different physical vocabulary.

O'Brien, playing against his usual handsome-hero type, is equally committed to looking pathetic. His Bradley doesn't just lose power; he regresses. His descent from slick corporate overlord to weeping, sunburnt dead weight is a fascinating exercise in shedding vanity. I'm not sure the third act sustains the delicate balance between dark comedy and slasher logic, though. The violence eventually escalates into a level of cartoonish grisliness that strains the reality the first two acts built so carefully.

Maybe that’s intentional. Maybe Raimi is just reminding us that out in the wild, the social contracts we sign in office cubicles don't mean a thing when you're hungry. Whether that final descent into madness works for you will depend on your tolerance for his specific brand of chaos. Either way, *Send Help* is a nasty, funny little picture. It certainly makes you reconsider exactly who you'd want sitting next to you on your next corporate retreat.