Send Help blends dark comedy and horror in a survival showdown

What would you do if you were stranded on a desert island with your most hated work colleague? That’s the premise of new survival film Send Help, which comes across as a marriage of Triangle of Sadness, sans pretention, and Misery as it deftly slides between pitch black comedy and squelchy horror.

In the film, Rachel McAdams plays Linda Liddle, a strategist whose work brilliance is offset by her social awkwardness and frumpy appearance. Frequently exploited by her superiors, Linda is nonetheless waiting patiently for a VP position promised by the CEO.

With his death, though, his suave son Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien) has taken over, and immediately gives the promotion to one of his Harvard frat mates and boys’ club golfing buddies. Bradley still needs Linda for an important meeting in Thailand, though, so she’s on the firm’s private jet when it goes down in the region, with Linda and Bradley the only survivors.

The good news is that Linda is a hardcore Survivor fan, so she knows what to do – thriving in the situation. The bad news – for Bradley anyway – is that she’s so in her element that she doesn’t want to be rescued.

With his stints behind the camera few and far between since the noughties, it’s a treat to see The Evil Dead’s Sam Raimi at the helm of Send Help, bringing his signature filmmaking flair to proceedings.

Expect camerawork creativity, zombie-adjacent jump scares, and an over-the-top approach to violence that will have you squirming in your seat, or turning your popcorn tub into an impromptu barf bag. Raimi isn’t afraid to push the boundaries of realism but, overall, Send Help springboards these shock moments off a fairly credible foundation.

What’s perhaps most enjoyable about Send Help is how slippery it is on multiple levels. This is a movie that can’t be trusted, but in the best way. As its core battle of wills plays out, audience sympathies seesaw between Linda and Bradley, both of whom are understandable but neither of whom are particularly good people, as it turns out. At the same time, the film consciously pushes against genre boundaries, teasing the audience with a potential romance, before heading off in another direction.

Raimi doesn’t even need to hammer on about gender inequality at the office, and the film’s obvious power reversal. It’s present, but it plays out in a way that is integrated with everything else going on – and the characters are hyper aware of it. On that note, McAdams and O’Brien sell the tonal shifts with their clearly committed, all-in performances, as desperation takes hold.

If you’ve watched 2022 Oscar nominee Triangle of Sadness, you may be surprised how much Send Help treads in many of the exact same narrative footprints of its predecessor’s island portion. However, Send Help is far more mainstream and accessible, with the flip side being, for all its structural cleverness (it doesn’t touch something like Blink Twice in terms of thematic sharpness), it’s ultimately not that memorable outside of its most graphic scenes.

While watching, though, in the moment, it makes for a darkly twisted good time – showing Raimi back in top form, with a duo of performers fearless in showing their characters' dark hearts. DM

Send Help is in cinemas now, having released on 30 January.