‘Send Help’: McAdams and O’Brien Are a Vicious Blast in Sam Raimi’s Horror-Comedy

Today I'm pleased to share Matt Goldberg's review of Sam Raimi's Send Help. Matt and I weren't able to attend Sundance in person this year but we'll be covering the digital portion of the festival starting this week. Look forward to a bunch of reviews and reflections from the both of us and subscribe to this newsletter to make sure you don't miss anything. -David Chen

It only takes a few minutes into Send Help to remember why Rachel McAdams is consistently one of the best and most underrated actors working today. For an actor who became a star playing the most gorgeous girl in high school (“I hear her hair’s insured for $10,000”), she makes for a socially awkward number-cruncher without missing a beat, and you can only sit stunned at a transformation that’s largely done through performance. The costuming and makeup help, but when you see her comic timing and the way she carries herself, it’s a reminder that McAdams is a force of nature whose power Hollywood has never fully appreciated. Thankfully, director Sam Raimi knows what he has in the talented actor and sets her against the equally underrated Dylan O’Brien in a cavalcade of bodily fluids that denote the filmmaker’s horror-comedies. Uninterested in crafting a morality play, Send Help sends its two leads at each other and lets the sparks fly.

No one at the office respects the homely, timid Linda Liddle (McAdams), least of all her new boss Bradley (O’Brien), who recently inherited the company from his deceased father. While Bradley’s late father had promised Linda a promotion to VP thanks to her smarts and workhorse attitude, Bradley thinks Linda is physically disgusting, and he has already promised the job to his old frat bro. However, he wants to squeeze a bit more work out of her, so he dangles the position in front of her by asking Linda to accompany him on a work trip to Thailand and hammer out some details of an upcoming merger. On the flight over, the plane crashes, and both Linda and Bradley wash up on a deserted island. Bradley soon learns that Linda is an avid outdoorswoman, knows plenty about survivalism, and her favorite show is Survivor. With his leg injured, he must now rely on a woman he despises, and she’s reluctant to cede her newfound power.

The most rewarding aspect of Send Help is starting both Linda and Bradley at the point of caricature and then giving the actors room to find the darkness and humanity in their characters. There’s a broader version of this movie where it’s just Linda making life miserable for Bradley and giving the audience the wish fulfillment of watching this put-upon woman torture her horrible boss. Thankfully, McAdams and O’Brien are much sharper than that, finding all the comic notes and little bits of sadness that make the characters feel realistic without losing the tension of the power struggle between them. Bradley unquestionably sucks, but we can also see the power going to Linda’s head, and what makes it a “horror” film is that we’re not necessarily rooting for anyone as much as we’re seeing how the nastiness of the situation unfolds.

Although McAdams has been so reliable for over 20 years, earned an Oscar nomination for her performance in Spotlight, and should have earned another one just for this line reading, few films have let her take center stage as she does here, and the actor knocks it out of the park. McAdams never loses sight of Linda’s dorkiness, even during her desert island glow-up, nor does she forget the transformation the character is undergoing in a world where she now has all the power. To call Linda simply the “hero” of the movie misses what the film seeks to convey about power, and how it’s not only a corrupting force, but arguably a necessary one when dealing with selfish, arrogant men like Bradley, who will never appreciate kindness or resourcefulness. It’s remarkable how far McAdams can lean into that darkness without losing sight of Linda’s underlying humanity.

O’Brien plays the other side of the equation beautifully. He has to dance on the line between wanting us to see Bradley get his just desserts and also feel weirdly protective of him, as we know he’s helpless without Linda. It’s not even so much that we want Bradley to survive or change as much as there’s no more movie if he dies, and it’s too much fun watching him try to boss Linda around only to have it blow up in his face. In this way, you have almost a Looney Tunes equation where we don’t show up so much to see Elmer Fudd suffer, but we do want to see how Bugs Bunny is going to make him look like a fool. That requires a thoughtfulness to render Bradley not only comically grotesque but also hint to Linda (and the audience) that he can change (or at least be brought to heel).

While the story hints at more dramatic and perhaps even romantic directions, Raimi keeps doing what he does best with his love of gross-out thrills. Although the director has shown he can succeed in genres like Western (The Quick and the Dead), neo-noir (A Simple Plan), and blockbusters (the original Spider-Man trilogy), you can never really take The Evil Dead (or particularly, Evil Dead 2) out of the guy, and I’m grateful for that. He splatters the screen with blood and other bodily fluids, and it offers the fun sense of revulsion that he’s provided for decades. Purists may flinch at the reliance on coupling the practical blood with CG effects, but even here, it helps add to the cartoonish vibe that makes the movie a dark delight.

Some viewers might recoil a bit at the film’s refusal to be a simple morality play, but watching these characters bounce off each other and get meaner and craftier makes Send Help a film that never runs out of steam. I had no idea how the film would resolve, and there were plenty of possible directions the story could have gone without betraying the characters’ motivations. Others might miss how good McAdams and O’Brien are here under the film’s gross-out charms, but make no mistake: Send Help not only survives, but thrives, because it has these two gifted performers at its center. No additional aid is required.

Send Help opens in theaters on January 30th.