Send Help

After a plane crash, Linda is stranded on a deserted island with her asshole boss, Bradley, and now they must overcome their past grievances if they hope to survive.

Sam Raimi is a movie-making legend.

Known for his distinctive and highly dynamic visual style, and for telling stories that balance wild moments of gore and horror with slapstick comedy, Sam Raimi has been making films since he was a kid, ever since the day that his father brought home a Super 8 camera. He went to college, studied English, and made a variety of short films and low budget feature films, and after three semesters, utilizing some family and friends and a network of investors, came up with $90,000 to make the seminal independent horror film, The Evil Dead (1981).

The story of a group of college students who decide to go up to an isolated cabin in the woods for a weekend, who then find an audio tape that, when played, releases a legion of demons, that forces sole survivor Ash Williams (Raimi’s long-time friend and collaborator, Bruce Campbell), to survive a night of increasingly gory mayhem. The film became a cult hit and launched Raimi's career.

Sam Raimi went on to direct, and often write, so many great films, not just the original Evil Dead 1 and 2, but the third Evil Dead film, Army of Darkness, as well as Darkman, A Simple Plan, The Gift, The Quick and the Dead, the Tobey Maguire Spider-man franchise, Drag Me To Hell, and one of my favorite films in the MCU, Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. A frequent collaborator of Joel and Ethan Coen, as Joel Coen was one of the editors of Evil Dead back in 81, he co-wrote The Hudsucker Proxy with them back in the mid-1980s. He also produced several television series, including Xena: Warrior Princess (1995–2001), and Ash vs Evil Dead (2015–2018), which saw Bruce Campbell reprise his role as Ash Williams, the handsome S-Mart worker and slayer of Deadites.

Despite now being a mainstay in the Hollywood Studio system, and a reliable box office hit-maker, Raimi is still considered to be a king of indie horror, an absolute legend, a name that has inspired legions of young filmmakers.

In addition to that, as much as I love the MCU Spider-man films, as well as the incredible Spiderverse films, Spider-man 2 (2004) is still the best Spider-man movie ever made, and 1990’s Darkman is still one of the best superhero movies ever made.

In short, he's the real deal.

I bring all of this up to say that, much like with Steven Spielberg, whenever Sam Raimi makes a new film, I’m going to check it out.

So…

Corporate strategist Linda Liddle is ready for her long-promised promotion. It’s a promotion that was promised to her by her former boss, who has recently passed. His son, Bradley Preston, has been appointed as the new CEO.

Unfortunately for Linda, she’s what you might call “a bit much” and she lacks a bit of self-awareness of that fact. Still, she’s smart and quirky and interesting, with a lot of interests, and she has a whole bunch of experience with traveling to far-off wild places, and is familiar with how to survive in those places. She’s happy. She likes her life. But one thing is clear, she’s alone.

All of her adventure pictures are selfies.

All this means that Angela generally just doesn’t fit in with all of the mediocre nobody’s hunched over in the cubicle farm at the corporate firm that she works at, a place that does something business office-y… like, mergers or some shit. Anyway, the Greek System Chads and the office Pick-me Girls think she sucks. And Bradley is a young arrogant dude, so he awards the promotion to a fellow douchebag by the name of Donovan, a recent new hire and one of Bradley’s fraternity brothers.

Linda confronts Bradley about this.

Bradley explains to Linda that he passed her over for the promotion due to her general off-putting energy and her lack of people skills. But when it becomes clear that he is going to need her number-crunching skills, not to mention her absolute willingness to sacrifice for the good of the Firm, in order to get them over the final hurdle in order to close a big impending merger, he invites her along on a business trip to Bangkok with him, Donovan, and some of the other young bro executives. He frames it as her chance to "prove him wrong" about her.

But during the flight, just as Linda creates the memo that will cinch the merger, thus ensuring Bradley’s fortunes and future with the firm, she overhears Donovan playing her audition tape for Survivor for Bradley and his sycophantic bro buddies, as they all have a good laugh.

Enraged, she deletes the memo.

Right at that same moment, the plane passes through a huge storm, and suffers a catastrophic engine failure. It immediately begins to rapidly lose altitude. The side of the plane blows off, and in the explosive decompression, everyone but Linda and Bradley are sucked out of the plane, as they were wearing their seatbelts. At the last moment, Donovan and one of the other sycophants cling to her, attempting to take her seat from her, but she stabs Donovan with a fork, and the two bros tumble out into the dark and stormy night, screaming, high above the ocean.

The best thing Linda has ever done was to not only refuse to provide any extra effort to the shitty company she works for, but to deliberately screw them over too, as to be a wooden clog in the machine is the noblest act a worker can aspire to. The second best thing she's ever done was to let those two assholes fall to their deaths.

The plane crashes into the sea.

The next morning, Linda washes up on the beach of a remote island in the Gulf of Thailand, and finds Bradley there too, alive but badly injured. Alone, with no other survivors on the island, Linda builds a shelter and secures food and water. Bradley relies on her, but he continues to treat Linda as a subordinate.

In response, Linda abandons him for two days.

When she returns, healthy and happy, Bradley is near collapse from dehydration. Though he is still resentful, he accepts her authority, especially as Linda proves to be very adept at survival, catching fish, gathering fruits, securing fresh water, and even killing and cooking a wild boar. For a time, things are fine, they’re great even, even somewhat lovely, honestly. Linda is in her element, and her and Bradley even seem to bond somewhat. It's clear that Linda kind of crushes on Bradley.

So she is loving this.

Unfortunately, all the power and freedom and vindication that comes from successfully surviving on this remote island, thriving even, starts to go to her head, and Linda loses herself a bit, and starts to make a few bad decisions... On top of that, Bradley can’t really be trusted either. Honestly, both of them are a bit selfish and they both make a few mistakes, they each say some things they maybe don’t mean, and yes, there’s a bit of maiming.

Also, a few innocents who happen onto the island are killed.

After that, this little island paradise begins to unravel, revealing some shocking secrets, and as a result, more than a little blood is spilled...

I really liked this movie.

It’s fun, it’s funny, it’s gory, it’s very satisfying in its conclusion, and it’s always funny to see the dudes out there who go on and on about how much they hate this film for “reasons” all while refusing to say the obvious real reason why they hate it out loud, which is that the lady kicks the dude's ass, is clearly better than him at everything, isn't sorry about it, and at one point, pretends to geld him.

Plus, I loved the film’s messages.

1. Your job will never love you. In fact, it hates you. It will never appreciate you, or your sacrifices, it will only use you, take every moment from you that it can, all while paying as little as possible, and if you die, it will replace you as soon as it can, and it will never think about you again. Because you only matter to it as long as you are useful and cheap.
2. The patriarchy is a societal cancer, and there’s nothing worse for civilization in general, or more generally worthless, than the mediocre douchebag bros such a broken society creates, as they suck up resources and time, while skating by on the work of others, and if you are a person who wants to see a better world, you should actively undermine and destroy these dumb fucks at every oppurtunity, because they will certainly do the same to you, given half the chance.
3. "No help is coming, so you'd better start saving yourself."

Send Help is one of the more entertaining films I’ve seen this year, one that plays in a lot of the same areas and themes as Triangle of Sadness, although in more of an obvious comedy/horror space then that film does. Plus, the two film’s stars, Rachel McAdams and Dylan O'Brien, are great together. They have some fantastic chemistry, even as adversaries, and as a result, are perfect foils for each other. At times during the film, you'll find yourself rooting for them to find a way to make it work on their little island paradise, despite the very fucked up situation, and the obvious crazy motivations at play. McAdams especially gives what may be a career best performance. She is funny, unhinged, and unpredictable, but also so easy to empathize with.

Although to be fair, it’s only her second best encounter with a plane.

The only sour note in this film is the fate of the fiancé and the guide. It’s a little hard to see a white woman murdering two people of color, one, a woman who she considers to be a rival, and the other, a local man from an exploited and under-resourced community, who she sees as standing in the way of her having her “best” life, as a forgivable thing. The act itself is earned in the story, and it isn't portrayed as a good or laudable thing, and Linda is by no means shown in the film to be an unimpeachable hero, but the optics still make it hard to swallow. And while, yeah, she does feel bad about it, while it does haunt her, and yeah, Linda is obviously not in a healthy place, especially by this point in the film, she also doesn’t seem to feel that bad about it, not really. And sure, it’s a movie, of course, and time is limited to tell your story, and you can only spend so much time in that particular space, I get that, but honestly, that only highlights the fact that this moment felt like a thing that should’ve been cut or reworked somehow.

But that aside, much like Blink Twice, it manages to end well.

And it’s the way it should end too, the right way. Sour note aside, in the end, I appreciate any art that is meant as a warning to the ruling class, the wealthy, the untouchable parasites at the top, all of those sons of bitches sitting in their soft and privileged seats. I'm for just about anything that might serve as a reminder to them that if they continue to refuse all other avenues when it comes to living in peace with the rest of society, they may find that they very much don’t like the only option left to us…