The Gift

My thoughts on Send Help

As many have already noted, Send Help marks filmmaker Sam Raimi’s first return to the horror genre where he first got his start via the original Evil Dead films since the release of Drag Me to Hell way back in 2009. More significantly, it marks the first time since then that he has made something that could be properly identified as a Sam Raimi film. Although he had shown that he could work outside the parameters of horror filmmaking while still demonstrating something resembling a genuine personal touch in films as varied as Darkman, A Simple Plan and The Gift, achieving blockbuster status with the original Spider-Man film back in 2002 may have given him A-list status and inspired one of the few genuinely great superhero films in Spider-Man 2 but ever since then, he has been keeping his distinctive gifts for visual spectacle, gruesome black humor and employment opportunities for aging automobiles hidden away in exchange for making gobs of money directing increasingly anonymous and mostly forgettable IP excursions like Oz the Great and Powerful and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Send Help is far from his best work and it seems unlikely to rake in the kind of cash that his recent movies have made but it is the first one in a while to leave fans of his earlier work excited to once again get at least a sense of what made those films so thrilling to watch.

Rachel McAdams stars as Linda Liddle, who sounds like she should be a comic book character, though she appears to be anything but at first. A mousy—or at least as mousy as anyone who looks like Rachel McAdams can muster (a mole on the cheek and an unfortunate dollop of tuna fish on the lip doing most of the heavy lifting)—manager in her corporate hellhole’s Planning & Strategy department, she clings to the promise made by the company’s recent deceased CEO to give her a long overdue promotion. Sadly, when the late man’s son, douchebro Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien) takes over, he gives the promotion to one of his old frat buddies and callously informs her that while obviously brilliant, she just doesn’t have what it takes to make it in the corporate world. He offers her a seeming lifeline by inviting her on an upcoming overseas business trip but that is only because she is the only one who can crack a key sticking point in the deal—although he pushes it as a way to show him her value, he plans on firing her the minute they return.

Before he can do that, however, the plane they are on crashes and while Bradley’s bros are all killed off in cheerfully gruesome ways, both he and Linda manage to wash up on a remote jungle island off the coast of Thailand. As it turns out, while Bradley, even factoring out his badly wounded leg, hasn’t the slightest idea of how to comport himself in the outdoors, Linda is a Survivor enthusiast who seems to have been training her entire life for just this sort of predicament—as Bradley lays unconscious, she is creating shelter, gather water and catching fish to eat. Once he awakens, Bradley tries to pull the alpha male card on Linda but as she quickly points out, “We aren’t in the office anymore.” With her survival skills trumping his slick corporate BS, the power dynamic between them quickly shifts and once he realizes that their positions have shifted, he backs down and the two begin to work together to try to survive in their new circumstances. For a while, it seems as they might be able to work together but there is always the sense that Bradley is merely biding his time until he can once again regain his dominance, not realizing that, having tasted actual power for once, Linda may not be so willing to relinquish it to her former tormentor.

The basic elements of Send Help, from the essential premise to its exploration of gender dynamics and power structures, have been seen in any number of other films, ranging from the various permutations of Swept Away to the insanely overrated Triangle of Sadness, and indeed, the one key failing of the film is that screenwriters Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, never quite figure out a way of making the concept seem fresh—the midsection drags a bit, the final twists are a bit too familiar and even the Survivor angle seems a little dated at this point and time. That said, while the narrative does not break any new ground, there is a certain undeniable appeal in watching the formerly put-upon Linda as she both finds herself while stuck in the middle of nowhere and the number of ways in which she manages to stick it to Bradley in order to bring him down to the level where she once found herself stuck. These are the moments in which Raimi’s distinctive style is allowed to fully flourish in ways that are both diabolically funny and gruesome—oftentimes both at once. For the first time in a long while, you get the sense that he is genuinely having fun behind the camera as he puts his two leads through their increasingly grueling paces, at one point spilling more blood in a single scene than he has in the last few decades.

The best thing about Send Help is the performance by McAdams, making her first onscreen appearance since her comparatively genteel work as the ultra-understanding mother in Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. Although the attempts to make her look dowdy are only fitfully effective at best, the early scenes find her playing the polar opposite of the sleek corporate monster that she portrayed so memorably in Brian De Palma’s Passion in a manner that is both awkwardly amusing and enormously sympathetic. As she begins to flower in her new circumstances, we enjoy watching her revel in her new sense of self but she does it in such a way that we are still rooting for her even after it become clear that she is perfectly willing to cross lines that not even Bradley at his worst would have even contemplated. By comparison, O’Brien, who turned in one of last year’s more notable performances in Twinless, doesn’t quite have the opportunity to go to the extremes that his co-star does but he does quite well with the material as well, even managing to find moments at certain points where you might find yourself experiencing some sympathy for a character who you might have cheerfully relished seeing lowered head-first into a stump grinder a couple of reels earlier.

A film that essentially asks the question, “What would have resulted if Neil LaBute had done a remake of The Blue Lagoon?,” with the stranded characters screwing each other over instead of. . .you know, Send Help is no masterpiece and it won’t be replacing any of Raimi’s earlier classics in the hearts of his devoted fans. That said, it has a certain wild energy to it that helps to get it past the dodgier patches and has more cinematic flair than one might normally expect to find in a film opening in the dead of January. While it is unlikely to reach the box-office heights of Raimi’s superhero shenanigans, perhaps the knowledge that he can still pull off a smaller-scale squirm-inducer like this may inspire him to continue with the kind of back-to-basics filmmaking that allows him to utilize his undeniable cinematic ingenuity instead of simply throwing millions of dollars of CGI at everything. And yes, there is even a contribution from none other than Bruce Campbell, though you have to know where to look for it.