SPOILER: This column contains potential spoilers for “Send Help.”
After 17 years, director Sam Raimi has returned to the horror genre with his latest film, “Send Help,” released Jan. 30.
As a major fan of “The Evil Dead” trilogy, I had very high expectations for this movie. What Raimi achieved with a budget of only $375,000 on “The Evil Dead” was groundbreaking for its time, and his deep roots in the horror genre have gone on to inspire many of today’s leading horror filmmakers, including Jordan Peele and James Wan.
This film follows Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams), a corporate strategist, and her boss, Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien), as their plane crashes on a deserted island and they try to survive. Shortly before the accident, Linda had been overlooked for a promotion Bradley's father promised to her before he left the company, creating an awkward relationship between the two characters.
The film opens by establishing Linda’s character and the overall dynamic of the office space. She is seen as an outcast who is kept around only for her work results. Bradley, on the other hand, is a young, arrogant boss immediately shown to be dismissive of his father’s wishes for the company.
When their plane crashes, the entire dynamic shifts between the two characters. While Linda quickly adapts to the deserted island as a hardcore fan of “Survivor,” Bradley is practically helpless with an injured leg and zero survival skills.
McAdams and O’Brien shine brightest in this film when they are first coming to terms with this change in power dynamics. Their polar opposite personalities clash on several occasions, especially when Bradley initially refuses to work with Linda, which marks some of the funniest moments in the entire film.
While this dynamic is entertaining and hilarious at first, it drags on for the majority of the second act, ultimately leaving the plot feeling very stagnant. Because of this, the film started to feel more like a comedy than a horror, with little to no jump scares or threats toward the main characters.
The scene that stuck out to me most was when Linda set out to hunt a boar on the island. Raimi cleverly used a point-of-view shot of the boar that I immediately recognized as the same shot composition as the Kandarian Demon in the “Evil Dead" films. This scene’s unique moment of tension was on a level of extremity I had hoped the entire film would be on, but it never quite reached those levels again.
Aside from the plot not progressing much throughout the film, the characters themselves do not develop much either. While O’Brien gives a hilarious performance as Bradley, his character comes off as very shallow with little motivation behind his actions. McAdams gives a captivating performance as well, but her actions toward the end of the film left me confused, as I felt they contradicted her character’s original morals of being true to oneself and choosing kindness.
Based on the trailers, it seemed as though the two might go insane from being stranded on an island for such an extended period of time, but the writing did not convey that at all. Up until the final twist, Bradley is still just a stuck-up boss, and Linda continues with a happy-go-lucky attitude. This makes the grand reveal not only feel rushed but also undeserved.
Without going too into detail, Linda decides she is not quite ready to give up her new power and does whatever it takes to keep the two of them stuck on the island, even if it means harming others. When Bradley realizes this, the two characters fight it out until Linda delivers the final blow.
Linda escapes the island shortly after and becomes the new CEO of Bradley’s company, but her persona has entirely changed. She dyes her hair, wears fashionable clothes, and even takes up golfing. For someone who wasn’t interested in doing any of those things at the start of the film, this made her character development feel backward, as she seems to be emulating the very person she despised in the beginning.
While Raimi’s latest horror film certainly entertained me, it felt like a cop-out from a story that should have been filled with tension and fear rather than jokes and laughs.
