“Send Help”, a review

I saw an early screening of “Send Help,” the new movie that stars Rachel McAdams and Dylan O'Brien. When I first saw the trailer, I thought it might be a fun “your worst nightmare” type of film. But I didn’t notice that it was directed by Sam Raimi of Evil Dead/Spider-man fame.

Plot recap: McAdams plays Linda Liddle, a nerdy employee at a high-tech firm. She’s expecting a promotion, but the new CEO, Bradley Preston, played by Dylan O’Brien, is an asshole and belittles Liddle’s contributions. They both are on a company jet when it crashes over the Pacific. The two are the only survivors who find themselves alone on a remote island. Luckily, Linda was an avid fan of the TV show “Survivor” and knows how to make fire three different ways.

With their power dynamics reversed, Linda is the boss on the island, and Bradley chafes at being under her thumb.

First, if you’re a fan of old-school Rami, you’ll probably enjoy “Send Help”. It’s full of scenes where people are physically assaulted in squirmish ways. One of the most troubling is a scene where Dylan O’Brien’s character thinks Rachel McAdams is castrating him.

It’s hard to sustain Raimi’s style of horror and humor for long. It largely worked with all three Evil Dead movies because all of them were less than 90 minutes. But “Send Help” is nearly 2 hours long, and the torture and cruelty get repetitive (McAdams vomits on O’Brien’s face at least three or four times).

I saw O’Brien in “Twinless” last year and he was excellent. This role isn’t as demanding but I think he does a decent job. The bigger issue for me was that even though O’Brien/Bradley is mysoginist asshole, McAdams/Liddle was delusional from the beginning. She’s the one who becomes a monster as the movie progresses. And I wish she had been caught or killed.

(I just realized that the last three films I’ve seen involve delusional people who feel justified threatening others.)