Rachel McAdams, a famous actor known for her starring role in Mean Girls, delivers an excellent performance in Send Help, a horror-survival thriller in which she is trapped with her controlling boss as an HR employee, giving the audience a glimpse of the toxic misogyny in the workplace.
Projectile vomiting, a horrific plane crash, and grisly bloody scenes leave little to the viewer’s imagination. Raimi’s film brings a brilliant addition to survival comedy retaining the gruesome elements of The Evil Dead and Drag Me to Hell while also employing suspense that makes watchers question the craziness of whether help will ever arrive. It performs no less impressively than those films and may even be more entertaining.
Linda (Rachel McAdams) expects to receive a promotion that was promised by the former CEO, who dies off-screen, but to her dismay, the company is taken over by spoiled Bradley (Dylan O’Brien). Bradley tells Linda that he sees no value in her as executive material and spends his time in rich leisure at the country club, living a frat-bro lifestyle.
To settle hostilities with Linda, he invites her on a company trip, but the two become washed up on a deserted island in Thailand with no one to rescue them. Bradley’s entitlement to boss Linda around and the team mocking her Survivor audition tape on the flight over leaves Linda in tears.
Shown through her adventurous trips and audition tape for Survivor, Linda proves to be resourceful and skilled on the island, taking care of her overbearing boss. Linda builds a shelter hut, sets a fire and fishes for food while Bradley complains about his limping leg and loss of his former lifestyle and insists the island is hell, refusing to adapt or even try to survive.
Bradley is ill-equipped and injured, and the film explores the trade of her moral values for corporate success. Linda, the provider, is “bringing home the bacon,” which infuriates Bradley, who is now dependent on Linda for survival and unrealistically believes the situation is the same and that he can still boss her around.
However, the power dynamic is shifting on the island, and Bradley needs to recognize it. Incapable of survival without Linda, in desperation, he eats a cockroach. Her killing of the boar reveals her ruthless determination to win at any cost, hinting at her decline in civilization and adopting a survival motto to outwit, outlast and outplay. Even though she had not been the boss in the workplace, she became the boss of the island, suggesting that climbing into the corporate world may require trading her values.
When Bradley realizes that Linda does not intend to leave the island, he prepares a raft and temporarily poisons her to escape, but the waves crush the raft, and she regains authority. Surprisingly, the pair could have been saved all along. On the other side of the island, hidden by Linda, is a luxury mansion with plentiful food and water, where boats frequently dock. This revelation had the audience questioning the identity of the true villain.
Linda quickly embraces the comforts of privilege, carrying a knife and easily preparing meals with access to a kitchen. Previously married to an emotionally abusive alcoholic, Linda routinely hid the car keys but, unhappy in their marriage, gave him the keys while drunk leading to his car crash. She cunningly and manipulatively uses her victim’s worst traits to their destruction, foreshadowing her deception in Bradley’s demise, tricking him with an unloaded shotgun as she beats him with a golf club.
Unlike Bradley, who dismissed her promotion without evaluating her background, Zuri is presented as a genuine and nice person, remembering Linda and overjoyed to find her fiancé alive. When Bradley’s fiance Zuri arrives to rescue him with a Thai tour guide, Linda guides them to an unstable cliff and pushes the tour guide and her off the cliff, committing murder she frames as an accident, which leaves the audience wondering the proposed limited role she had in her husband’s death.
Confronted by Bradley, the two fight, where he rips out her scalp and gouges her eye, and she stabs him. Enraged upon discovery of the house, Bradley wrestles Linda for the gun, which is revealed to be unloaded, and she beats him with a golf club before casually swinging at the celebrity golf course.
Rewriting her survival with a best-selling narrative, Linda, the protagonist of the story, heroic rise to success is far from gracious. Her initial relatability and past submissive nature hid her true ambition, suggesting that her lack of power and access to success—not morals—prevented her from being the true villain all along. Overall, I would rate this movie a solid 9.
