Send Help‘s Power Plays Are Like a Poke in the Eye

Sam Raimi's old-school mayhem gets deployed for a slow-burn punishment of manosphere jerks that drags its feminist hero down with it.

By Carl Strange

Sometimes you start off a hero, then end up the villain.

Happened to me the other night. Heroically attempting to entertain friends, I invited them to join me on the sofa, bought Send Help via streaming, and thought, “Yes! We’re going to have fun seeing the latest Sam Raimi flick!” The movie unfolded at first like clever origami, then like a set of entrails. Chuckles became cringes, wows winces. I had to apologize: I’d become the villain.

So what happened? Well, I forgot something important: Sam Raimi has no patience for heroes. Heroes are often boring. His solution: Turn them into villains. That’s why in both Spider-Man 2 and Spider-Man 3, Peter Parker becomes a cad. Even in the first Spider-Man, Raimi reveled in the cackling of Willem Dafoe as much as the upside-down smooching of Peter Parker and Mary Jane.

The best moments in Raimi’s early, Evil Dead films are when the hero, Ash, cockily tells a girlfriend to “Give me some sugar, baby,” battles his own demon-possessed hand, or gets taunted as “Little goody two-shoes!” by his mirror image. In later films, such as morality tale A Simple Plan, sympathy turns sour in spite of well-established motivations. Cursed Alison Lohman in Drag Me to Hell made cruel compromises but was still likable. Even in The Gift, Raimi’s wonderfully pulpy Southern-Gothic thriller, Cate Blanchett’s kindly clairvoyant gives exactly the wrong advice to a disturbed client when it counts most. (What were you thinking, Cate? You were psychic!)

Raimi’s view of heroes is of the “warts and all” variety, to the point where in Send Help, he gives Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) a small constellation of warty bumps on her face. McAdams’s workaholic strategist who was promised a promotion by her company’s founder, but she’s also a flibbertijibbet whom her frat-bro coworkers treat the way cats treat a litterbox.

Rachel McAdams transformed from office nerd to island survivor — From doormat to dominant: Rachel McAdams is transformed. What next? (20th Century Studios)

McAdams makes an appealing underdog, but c’mon, is she really too clueless not to wipe tuna salad from her mouth before meeting the new CEO (Dylan O’Brien), who struts a cubicled corridor not expecting to be micro-grossed-out? Send Help‘s opening scenes, like those in Drag Me to Hell, are set in modern workplaces where the female protagonist plays by rules the men break whenever it suits them. Raimi sets it all up with broad strokes: that new CEO not only passes over McAdams for his fraternity brother (Xavier Samuel), he sexually harasses female applicants, then turns a longtime employee (Dennis Haysbert) into his personal sniff-tester.

When McAdams walks into the CEO’s office to complain, O’Brien tells her he admires her “balls,” then he putts one of his own (a golfball, that is) into a practice target. Stay tuned for more testicles and golf tee-offs, because Raimi never met a cliche he couldn’t rework as a ridiculous callback. It’s all in good fun, you see, except when it’s too damned much. Again, maybe I’m the bad guy: Complaining about excess in a Raimi film is like saying “These pickles are too briney!” or “What’s with all the sex at this orgy?”

McAdams valiantly tries to both leaven and ground it all. I loved McAdams as counterpart to Jason Bateman in Game Night, especially after she dispatches a bad guy and has an epiphany of un-game-like finality: “Awww, he died!” In Send Help, McAdams is terrific whether enduring humiliations (the bro-workers mock her earnest video submission to be a Survivor contestant) or in punishing real-life survival situations (triumphantly sploshed after impaling a monstrous boar). As if channelling the blood-soaked Sissy Spacek in Carrie, McAdams’ eyes light up with actualized power as she goes from office dork to outdoor badass. Her complexion improves too.

Before that happens, Send Help has one of those movie scenes where people get sucked out of an airplane — an overdone trope right up there with “person stumbles into street and gets squished by bus.” Raimi can’t help himself: If he’s gotta kill off a few characters, he’s going to do it in the showiest way possible. Teeth turn into flying Chiclets. Necktie becomes mid-air noose. All of it somehow slapstick, and he’s just warming up.

Rachel McAdams and Dylan O'Brien in Sam Raimi's Send Help — Are they getting closer, or are they pretending to get closer while waiting to pounce? (20th Century Studios)

The bulk of Send Help takes place after McAdams and O’Brien wash up on a deserted island, ala Cast Away, or TV’s Lost. (The Gulf of Thailand setting evoked a similar zeitgeist queasiness in White Lotus season 3.) Hyper-competent McAdams turns into a peppy Swiss Family Robinson type, using her advanced survival knowledge to build a shelter, collect rainwater, and yelp triumphantly after she starts a fire. After some fishing and foraging, she makes gourmet sushi, as you do. Wait a minute….where’d she get a chef’s knife?

O’Brien, groaning from a wounded leg, keeps treating McAdams as his employee. The pampered brat forgets: If she quits, he’s helpless. Office politics give way to Survivor-style headgames. There’s even a conch — ala Lord of the Flies — which our heroine reminds us is pronounced “konk.” The duo’s reconciliation is tenuous: Is this “bro” willing to give up his presumption of dominance? Is McAdams willing to give up her newly forged power? Will their conch truce turn into…konks?

McAdams and O’Brien work well together, but they can scarcely keep up with Send Help‘s many contrivances and shifting suspicions. Further distracted, I kept trying to figure out why Dylan O’Brien reminded me of someone else. My companians recognized him as the lead in the Maze Runner movies, but I got stuck on his thematically apt resemblance to the bobbleheaded, clueless right-wing pundit Ben Shapiro. Then it clicked: O’Brien’s voice and expressions recall Jimmi Simpson, especially in his similarly imperious CEO role opposite Cristin Milioti for Black Mirror‘s “USS Callister” episodes. (Which are highly recommended; more about that here.)

Rachel McAdams uses a rat to reprise a scene from Hard Candy — Rachel McAdams does a bit more than call her boss a dirty rat. (20th Century Studios)

The two actors do not establish sexual chemistry, yet Send Help hints at budding romance as if depicting a “Choose Your Path to Adventure” story with a Blue Lagoon option. It also throws in mutual-suspicion Mr. & Mrs. Smith and full-spite War of the Roses options. Then it adds a Hard Candy castration scene, paying homage to the righteous 2005 Elliot Page thriller. (Unlike that film, Send Help avoids seriously addressing sexual assault, preferring to pop eyeballs from sockets.)

The movie’s accelerating craziness makes for a bumpy ride instead of a exhilarating one — with reversals and twists leaving me whiplashed. Raimi’s lack of nuance becomes detrimental: I found O’Brien’s antagonist too one-dimensionally dickish to care what happened to his dick. McAdams goes all-out to embody a 9 to 5 workplace fantasy as if channeling Kathy Bates from Misery, but her descent into campy villainy didn’t work for me. I genuinely wanted to root for her, but gave up.

It felt like now-legendary Raimi, distanced from modern workplace culture, fell back on what he knows: movies. As if quoting past hits, Raimi’s camera zooms through a web ala Spider-man, and drifts above tree branches revealing a wriggling centipede in the same way it showed crows — caw! caw! — throughout A Simple Plan. There’s an Evil Dead-style zombie jump-scare. And remember the face-barfing in Drag Me to Hell? Send Help takes its face-barf scene to the level of an Evil Dead II geyser.

It sometimes feels like the director used Send Help to explore the grossout latitude widened by The Substance (see our review), though he teasingly pulls back before irreparable mutilation. If you’re eager to see Send Help, you, too, can pull back. Rather than peak Raimi, it’s Raimi climbing a peak, luring audiences to the edge, then poking us over and over with a sharpened stick.

Some diehard fans will enjoy Raimi’s Three Stooges-level mayhem deployed for an ironic-feminist, slow-burn punishment of Andrew Tate-admiring, manosphere jerks. But after making my companions sit through it, I felt like the jerk.

Rachel McAdams in a scene reminiscent of The Birds by Alfred Hitchcock — Is this a reference to *The Birds*? Or just a really cool way to move a pet? (20th Century Studios)

Addendum, Part One: To rinse the stink off of my disappointment with Send Help, I viewed 1982’s An Officer and a Gentleman, which I’d never seen (it’s quite good, and unlike Send Help it features actual gentlemen). By astonishing coincidence, both Send Help and An Officer and a Gentleman show someone swallowing an engagement ring. What are the odds?

Addendum Part Two: Send Help‘s ending puts McAdams and her caged bird in a pose almost identical to Tippi Hedren driving up the coast in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963). Was Raimi making a sly meta-textual comment about the power differential between Hedren and Hitchcock?