Send Help
Survival of the fittest, both in the boardroom and on a tropical island.
A whole genre of books is dedicated to the idea that reading them will unlock the secret to life, love, or work. They’re generally quick reads: conveniently slim paperbacks sold in airports, each one selling its ideas about winning friends, influencing people, and generally becoming successful. Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) could use a little help herself. She’s a hardworking optimist who puts in long hours at the office to complete meticulous reports. Her cubicle is lined with cheerful motivational posters, a testament to the self-help belief that the right attitude can bring success.
In her consulting firm’s office culture, survival of the fittest means being beautiful and smooth, able to reassure clients and superiors that everything is in good hands, regardless of the numbers or the person who actually crunched them. The C-suite is populated by fraternity connections with people skills. Linda, a manager in the Strategy & Planning division, has dowdy shoes, flyaway hair, and a habit of keeping tuna sandwiches in her desk. She doesn’t stand a chance of success … until the plane carrying her and a handful of colleagues crashes off the coast of a deserted tropical island somewhere in the Gulf of Thailand, killing everyone on board except Linda and her CEO, Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien).
Once Send Help reaches the island, it finds its footing. So does Linda, who has been preparing for the crash landing her whole life, though she didn’t expect it to happen quite like this. She’s a Survivor devotee, her bookshelves at home are lined with survival guides and stories, and she has a knack for making fire and shelter and gathering food. It turns out that reading the right book can help you make the best of a bad work situation, provided the book is about making shelter out of palm fronds. Bradley didn’t get the memo. He is immediately out of his depth: injured, helpless, and petulant that no one seems to be coming to rescue them.
McAdams plays Linda with a self-awareness her character doesn’t quite share, to comedic effect. She finds the humor in Linda’s pathetic situation in the office, and a kind of inverse joy alongside Linda’s realization that the island represents a new kind of freedom. She blossoms during her time on the island. Even her hair loses its frizz. She has found her place, and she takes to it as effortlessly as though she’s simply switched shampoo brands.
McAdams’s comic timing is the movie’s secret sauce, an excellent match for director Sam Raimi’s signature wild camera. Best of all is a boar-hunt action sequence, in which Linda sets out into the jungle armed with a makeshift spear and a can-do attitude. Raimi shoots the action from the boar’s perspective, barreling through the undergrowth at cranked-up speeds as though the animal is one of the monsters from his Evil Dead movies. Raimi’s sensibility being what it is, the scene can only end with buckets of blood and a laugh line, expertly delivered.
The horror of Send Help isn’t supernatural (or even particularly scary); the movie is about the existential danger of living under a soul-sucking boss. Live too long for the rat race, and you’ll end up a rat with the others. Here the movie’s motivations become muddled. Linda and Bradley’s situation has a tropical Misery dynamic, with a successful man finding himself injured and at the mercy of a hypercompetent woman whom he underestimates at his own peril. Like McAdams, O’Brien has solid comedic timing, and he understands that his character is the butt of the joke: a rich jerk who insists on wearing suede loafers long after they’ve set up camp on the beach. We’re set up to root for Linda, until suddenly we aren’t, in a bait-and-switch that begs to be misread as broadly as the ending of Ari Aster’s Midsommar.
Send Help floats a few interesting ideas about corporate America and the way the ladder of success is rigged to favor rich, handsome frat bros whose parents founded their companies, but the movie isn’t actually interested in the logistics of tearing down a bad system. It’s a lightly twisty thriller with some fun sequences and the depth of a beach read … or a self-help book. Which is fine—not all movies need to be thick tomes of theory. There’s no secret for defeating an awful boss, no simple trick to climbing the corporate ladder, no forbidden knowledge that guarantees success. The trouble is that Send Help persists in the belief that there just might be a way to game the system, despite all evidence to the contrary. It’s the kind of optimistic delusion that keeps self-help books in business. —Sarah Welch-Larson
★★☆☆
Send Help is in theaters now.