I don’t know if anybody was asking what The Blue Lagoon would look like in the hands of Sam Raimi, but we’re quite fortunate that he decided to show us anyway.
It’s been a long time since Raimi has directed outside of the typical Hollywood franchise bubble -the last movie to truly be called his own was 2009’s Drag Me to Hell. In fairness, he did have a hiatus of about a decade before Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness in 2022, during which he time he produced a fair number of weird genre projects for other directors. And maybe something rubbed off on him, to a small degree on his Marvel film -which is at least aesthetically more weird and compelling than a lot of its cohorts- but especially so on his latest movie, which seems to prove he doesn’t just have superhero films to offer anymore. And Send Help is refreshingly free and loose and twisted in a way that we both haven’t seen from him in a while and has just in general been missing from mainstream cinema.
A survival-comedy-thriller that comments also on workplace toxicity in the world of big business, the film stars Rachel McAdams as Linda Liddle, a mild-mannered but excitable corporate strategist cheated out of a promotion she deserved by the arrogant, conceited new playboy CEO Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien) who inherited the position from his recently deceased father. As a hollow olive branch, she is invited along to the finalization of a merger in Bangkok, but the plane gets caught up in a storm and violently crashes into the sea, where both Linda and Bradley wash up on the shore of a deserted island the only survivors. With Bradley’s leg badly sprained and Linda a resourceful survivalist their power dynamic is suddenly drastically reversed, bringing with it new tensions.
Raimi lays out the foundation of this relationship and its tone pretty early -within a minute’s screen-time it is hard to not to sympathize with Linda’s earnest sweetness and be repulsed by Bradley’s odious shallowness. He squares us in the boss’s perspective during Linda’s exuberant introduction, closing in extremely on a crumb of tuna sandwich on her lip -a mark of severe character deficiency for the judgmental prick. His condescending manner subsequently while she protests his giving her promotion to a frat buddy only further cements rather easily the tenor of audience allegiance. This is achieved strongly through the performances of McAdams and O’Brien, but also through Raimi’s very considered choices of pace, composition, and editing to emphasize the class and power disparity between these two and to highlight it in Bradley’s manner to an absurd degree. Whatever bad might happen to him next, he’s got it coming.
On the island once they are in this new situation, the narrative plays on a few of the beats you would expect, Linda’s confidence growing with her survivalist skills and manifesting into a braver, more confrontational attitude towards her boss while he retains his dismissive snobbishness before being forced to acquiesce to Linda’s efforts to keep them both alive and concede some power, however unwillingly, over to her. A normal movie might continue along this path as a way of mature character development for them both, with perhaps even an unexpected romance blossoming as is conventional for narratives of male and female characters stranded alone together. But this is not a normal movie, and while there are nuggets of these things, Raimi and his writers are much more interested in taking the film in a more tense and comically twisted direction.
Linda not only can survive the island, but thrive on it -such as in her intuitive thinking when devising a system of collecting water and she is outright awakened via an extremely bloody (this is Raimi after all) killing of a wild boar. Soon she conspires to keep her and Bradley stranded for as long as possible -she spots a boat off the far shore relatively early and doesn’t tell him. Gradually, her means of keeping this status quo grows more and more deranged, until Bradley picks up on it and begins to even fear for his life. But what makes this turn as fun as it is suspenseful is how Raimi and McAdams play it as distinctly circumstantial. If Bradley treated her with just a little kindness and grace, there would be nothing to worry about.
O’Brien however plays the character to the height of elite boorishness and toxic male resentment, and it's a lot of fun to watch -especially as these qualities are only enhanced by his desperate circumstances. While Linda does well for herself, Bradley suffers physical and psychological torment, yet even through his sympathetic beats and perspective focus, O'Brien is sure to keep him just a little callous or unlikable. Eventually the relationship comes to resemble that in Misery or other stories of captives needing to placate a psychotic custodian, although played with a wry dark comedy towards an Annie Wilkes you can broadly get behind.
There is nothing of an innocent foil here though, McAdams gives a confident, fantastically devious performance that is her most exhilarating in years in terms of the demands she rises to seamlessly. Even as she plays the gamut from timid to vicious to fanatical, she keeps Linda's foundations of eagerness, anxiety, and desperation for love and acceptance clear. A story around the midpoint about her horrible ex-husband (as well as the suspicious circumstances of his death) lends a little dimension of both added sympathy and tension that McAdams incorporates shrewdly into her character's demeanour from that point on. She does take on a real intimidating energy from the deeply sad and pitiable character she starts the movie as, but the shift feels entirely organic -a repressed part of her personality she gives glimpses to early that in these right circumstances is allowed to be expressed. For McAdams too, it feels like this side of her acting talents have been long gestating, and Raimi has at last given voice to them.
But in doing so and so extravagantly, his themes on power dynamics are never diluted. Both in terms of class and gender, the movie has fun in setting them up through the corporate world in mild caricature and then subverting them in extreme ways. There are a few very blunt beats to this effect -a cute little desk that Linda fashions for herself in which she meets with Bradley when he is forced to crawl back to her after failing to forage on his own; and even uses some of his own jargon against him. The humiliation she received is paid back through various forms of emasculation Bradley endures, both of his own and Linda's making -all privileged, patriarchal assumptions meaning nothing in this context. Stripped away, the movie demonstrates how pointless such artificial structures really are and that those who benefit most from them would also be the most lost without them in place.
That is probably a big part of what makes the movie endearing in spite of all its raw and dark edges, its genuinely surprising degrees of horror and violence, and the uplifting of a character who would be the villain of any other movie into an anti-hero purely on the basis of how scummy her scene partner is. Send Help is a welcome return for Sam Raimi, gleefully eccentric and energetic -a touch of the old Evil Dead wrapped in the veneer of broad Hollywood entertainment. A wicked delight.
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