We don’t sufficiently appreciate Rachel McAdams. More than 20 years after Mean Girls, she remains one of the most versatile actors of her generation. Furrowed and Oscar-nominated in Spotlight. Hugely touching in Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. She is quietly among the best we have.
So all hail Sam Raimi – a different sort of treasure – for fashioning an entertainment that exploits all McAdams’s gifts to delightful and disturbing effect. From a much-passed-around screenplay by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, Send Help sits adjacent to the comic-horror genre the director made his own, decades back, with the Evil Dead franchise.
“Adjacent” but not fully within. The film takes so many tonal chicanes at such speed that the audience could be forgiven for occasionally feeling the ground crumble beneath their feet. Now it’s horror. Now it’s light comedy. Now it’s revenge drama. McAdams manoeuvres all those swerves with singular aplomb. Rarely has a mainstream entertainment played such amusing tricks with our sympathies. She begins nice. She turns nasty. She is most engaging at her most appalling. Quite a trick.
We begin in the world of grim office politics. Mousy (look, that’s how McAdams plays it) corporate strategist Linda Liddle keeps a financial-services company alive with her diligent, tireless researches, but her appalling male colleagues – golfers with triangular torsos – see her as only a resource to be exploited. They get the credit. She gets sneered at for her bad hair.
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Things get worse when Bradley Preston, the new boss, played with copious slime by a game Dylan O’Brien, nixes her promised promotion and threatens to exile her to the corporate boondocks. Before that he takes her on a trip to finalise a merger in Bangkok. The private plane hits turbulence and crashes near a desert island.
More bloodthirsty Raimi fans will get what they need from Send Help. The absurdly heightened plane crash – cowardly colleagues screaming, ball-eyed, like the victims in 1950s horror comics – allows McAdams to reveal the character’s hitherto concealed spine of steel.
We sense a pendulum swinging as Bradley and Linda wash-up on an abandoned beach straight out of movie cliche. Raimi is nothing if not a realist. He relishes the opportunity to have Linda – now with no toiletries, running water or make-up – discover a coarse glamour she has never managed in civilisation. Why not? Brooke Shields managed the same in the notorious Blue Lagoon an aeon ago.
It seems as if the screenwriters dreamed up Send Help before Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness won the Palme d’Or. That was a busier, angrier film that attempted broader critique of social hierarchies, but the key inversion is the same. The person who knows how to gut a fish, build a fire and fashion a shelter – Linda once auditioned for Survivor – is now at the top of the pyramid. Bradley begins by lording it. Before long he is begging for mercy.
Does it matter that the final twist is so telegraphed that only the weak of mind will not guess what is coming? Probably not. The screenplay looks to be inviting us to pat ourselves on the back early on as clues lead in just one direction.
The whole film is something of a parlour game – a structure that gives permission for its characters to become whatever suits the latest unlikely swerve. O’Brien, so good in the recent Twinless, relishes that opportunity. McAdams steps up and manages to make a disgraceful heroine of a character who, in a less proudly cynical film, might lose the audience after one moral transgression too far.
Great thumping soundtrack by Danny Elfman. Lush cinematography by Bill Pope that leans into the unreality. Trash this classy doesn’t come along often enough.
In cinemas from Thursday, February 5th
