Send Help review: an ode to every worker who has had a bad boss
When it comes to director Sam Raimi’s films, you have to go to the theater knowing that you’re about to experience a piece of cinema that oscillates between the utterly ridiculous and the sublime. However Send help is much more grounded than the projects he is best known for, like The evil deaths Or Drag me to hellit’s a quintessential Raimi film that doesn’t pretend to hide how unbalanced and disturbing its story is going to be.
On more than one occasion, Send help it almost feels like a live-action cartoon. Its heavy foreshadowing and ridiculous set pieces are meant to make you wince in horror before making you laugh at their ridiculousness. But for all its strangeness, there is something deeply relevant about the conflict that sets up Send help in movement and message and in the way it depicts the horrors of working for a terrible boss.
Although most Send helpSet on a glamorous, deserted island somewhere in the middle of the ocean, the film opens in a joyless office where Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) works as a planning and strategy manager. After devoting years of her life to the company and saving her countless sums of money with her expertise, Linda and one of her kindest colleagues, Franklin (Dennis Haysbert), know that their boss has promised her a well-deserved promotion. But when the company’s elderly CEO/founder dies suddenly and leaves the company to his boorish son Bradley (Dylan O’Brien), Linda is devastated to learn that the management role intended for her has been given to an incompetent man who has only been working there for a few months.
As the news leaves Linda, a seemingly mild-mannered woman who reads like a riff on Batman returns“Before the transformation, Selina Kyle – heartbroken, is tenacious enough to confront Bradley about the situation and convince him to rethink his choices. He agrees to consider her for the job if she accompanies him and a few other male executives on a work trip to their Bangkok office. During their flight on a small plane, Linda realizes that Bradley and his cronies are only trolling her as a cruel joke. Linda is furious, but her rage quickly turns to fear desperate when the plane suffers a catastrophic malfunction and crashes into the ocean before sinking.
As terrifying as you might think of plane crashes, Raimi’s approach to depicting this kind of accident is simply breathtaking in the sense that it will leave you shocked and a little disoriented. The event gives Send help a way to quickly (and humorously) clarify its casting, but it also reveals new things about its two protagonists. Washing dishes on an uninhabited island with no food or tools would immediately send most people into a disastrous existential spiral, but the situation is a dream come true for Linda, a longtime fan of the film. Survivor reality TV series. She sees her predicament as an opportunity to put into practice everything she’s learned from watching people compete on TV. And when Linda finds Bradley alive but seriously injured further down the beach, she figures they might as well keep each other company.
Even if there’s a fantasy in the way Send help presents life on the island, the film takes care to dissipate the latent tension that rises and falls between Linda and Bradley. It feels like Raimi wants you to lose track of how much time has passed since the plane crash, but you’re meant to see how being stuck pushes the two coworkers to become themselves. Both McAdams and O’Brien lead with a delicious hammering that makes their characters feel very close to caricature. As she begins to thrive in the elements, he becomes even more of a pompous asshole, and it takes a storm to wash away their camp for the two to start seeing each other as allies.
While Send help borrows some notes from other island survival features like Shipwrecked And The blue lagoonyou can feel Raimi throwing a series of dark ones, Misery– adjacent twists and turns that take this story in a markedly different and more stressful direction. As Linda and Bradley grow closer, their power dynamic repeatedly shifts in unexpected ways, and the film toys with your understanding of where the island’s true danger lies. What’s most disturbing is how difficult it is to know whether the things survivors say about themselves are actually true. But Send helpThe final acts showcase all the cards beautifully with all-too-satisfying panache.
However Send help may not entirely surprise you, it’s a fun roller coaster of a film with a perfect understanding of when and how it needs to shift in tone to be exciting. And if you’ve ever wondered what you might do if you were forced to survive alongside someone you hated, Send help well worth the price of admission.
Send help also stars Edyll Ismail, Xavier Samuel, Chris Pang, Thaneth Warakulnukroh, Emma Raimi and Bruce Campbell. The film hits theaters on January 30.
