'Send Help' review: Rachel McAdams, Dylan O'Brien stranded on desert island in delightful horror-comedy
Dylan O'Brien as Bradley Preston and Rachel McAdams as Linda Liddle as office colleagues stranded after a plane crash in "Send Help." Credit: 20th Century Studios/Brook Rushton
PLOT A mistreated employee and her domineering boss switch roles when they’re stranded on a desert island.
CAST Rachel McAdams, Dylan O’Brien
RATED R (violence, language and some gore)
LENGTH 1:53
WHERE Area theaters
BOTTOM LINE Rich irony and bloody humor make Sam Raimi’s horror-comedy a deliciously nasty treat.
Meet Linda Liddle, part of the strategy and planning team at Preston Consulting. She’s smarter than her co-workers, but also poorly dressed, annoyingly peppy and obsessed with the show "Survivor.” No one’s surprised when Linda’s much-younger boss, Bradley Preston, passes her over for a promotion and instead picks a glad-handing college buddy. What Bradley wants, he explains, is "somebody who golfs.”
How poetic, then, that Linda (Rachel McAdams) and Bradley (Dylan O’Brien) should survive a plane crash and wash up on a desert island in Sam Raimi’s "Send Help.” Suddenly, Linda’s abilities to build a shelter and gut a fish seem a lot more useful than, say, Bradley’s putting skills. The expression on Linda’s face is pure pleasure when she points out the obvious: "We’re not in the office anymore, Bradley.”
"Send Help” finds Raimi, the great gonzo-horror auteur behind "The Evil Dead” and "Drag Me to Hell,” back in fine form after a couple of recent detours (the James Franco vehicle "Oz the Great and Powerful” and the superhero installment "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness”). This is a terrific little film, a Grimm’s fairy tale for the white-collar crowd with themes of sweet revenge and fickle fate. And while it may sound strange to say about a movie that features stabbing, gutting, skull-bashing and eye-gouging, "Send Help” is compact, economical and even downright elegant.
It must have taken work to transform a beauty like McAdams into the office weirdo, but she and Raimi (and their costume and makeup teams) have managed it amazingly well. Even funnier than Linda’s scraggly hair and weird sweaters, though, is the way she gradually blossoms in the warm sun of the island. As much as Bradley looks down on her even now, he can’t suppress the occasional double take. O’Brien works nicely in this role, a thoughtless rich kid who's not entirely horrible. We can empathize with the guy, especially when Linda begins tapping into her hidden killer instinct.
A workplace comedy transplanted into a literal jungle, "Send Help” benefits from a mischievous screenplay by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, two fine lead actors and Raimi’s intuitive gift for a good joke and a good scare. You’ll never mock a coworker again.
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