The Bloody Social Politics of Send Help

“I have been underestimating my whole life,” says a game Rachel McAdams in Sam Raimi’s latest flick, the grisly two-hander survival thriller Send Help, and it makes for a compelling refrain to frame the film on. Linda Liddle from Strategy & Planning has spent her entire life as the butt of this unspoken joke, by her co-workers, by her boss, until she's stranded on a deserted island with said boss (Dylan O’Brian, in peak manchild form), where she finds she thrives, where her skills are actually essential to their continued survival, and finds out just how far she'll go to keep being needed. 

What transpires is an eminently entertaining horror comedy you wouldn't expect to drop in the dump month of January, a capital G great movie so early in the year that’s indebted to a long legacy of films that question the social mores of rage—what reads as valiant for men and out of line for women—and take pain to subvert, flip, and turn that on its head. Female rage is not that new a genre, yet it’s maybe gotten this… newfound appreciation when we feel so alienated by the world around us. 

Where, for Carrie, high school was the battleground of monstrous femininity, for Asami in Audition, it was the frigid dating culture of Japan. I find it fascinating how Raimi builds Linda’s struggle within corporate culture, only to quickly drop the pretense with a full-throttle plane crash set piece. Send Help moves at a lightning pace in setting the stage, gnarly, disgusting, with all our favorite practical effects and Raimi-isms to make the blood rush to our ears. And without the costume of modern society, the movie illustrates how much capitalism is a pantomime none of us asked to be part of. Linda, at the bottom, frumpy, having to awkwardly (and unsuccessfully) beg her way into corporate karaoke, has immediately found food, water, and built shelter by the time Bradley, the top dog, is useless on the island, deigning to wake up just to bark unhelpful orders at her.

All before any blood is shed (which, there's a lot of it, trust, and it's brutal), their narrative positions flip, and in that Send Help highlights how much casual cruelty Bradley lobs at Linda, and how much care she reserves for him, even when she's literally got him by the balls.

I was worried coming into the film, based on the trailer, that it would unfold like Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness, with, like, a really stupid understanding of sociology, but the screenplay by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift sticks to a simpler sentiment: power doesn't corrupt; it reveals. And narratives about toxic male rage necessitate extraordinary circumstances for us to care about them, but female rage reads as cathartic precisely because it’s rooted in reality. McAdams, with all her windswept ferocity, finds power in self-sufficiency but gives it back, even if it's conditioned on disempowering her boss; it comes from a very righteous place of resentment.

O’Brien curls his character like a slippery worm, who tries to usurp his primary caregiver at every turn and launches back with a charming facade when it invariably fails. And I couldn't help but wonder, why Linda (and I as an audience member) was so keen to give him chance after chance? It's not that Linda is completely justified in everything she does—she does some nasty shit in this, and mileage will vary whether it's deserved—but why are we so inclined to condemn her at her worst but barely as much to Bradley, who has no redeeming qualities? Where Send Help excels is in indicting this instinct in the funniest ways possible, through gratuitous acts of body horror and boy failure, and a gnarly swing of honesty. You can only push someone so far before they break, and hell hath no fury like a woman under late-stage capitalism.