Send Help

Don’t give up on your dreams and don’t let them fester and die in the exchange for some financial security.  Climg to them and chase them against all odds and common sense until they drive you to madness and murder in their pursuit.  That’s the American Dream in Sam Raimi’s world, or at least within the world of Send Help.  A nightmarish take on the Swept Away genre of castaway romance blended with comedy, cynicism and copious bodily fluids, Send Help is the old school Evil Dead director returned to a dazzlingly bleak and entertaining world built around the question of who is the least vile.

Your first thought would not be mousy financial manager Linda Liddle (McAdams), a quiet cubicle worker diligently working towards her long desired promotion before going home to her pet parrot.  Of course, your first thought would not be she is also a multiple-time candidate to appear on “Survivor” with a wealth of knowledge under her fingertips about taming an uncivilized wilderness if she ever found herself stranded on one.  People have depths.  Some people; not so much her new boss Bradley Preston (O’Brien) who has inherited wealth without working for it and has no idea how to survive in the wild (and was preparing to fire Linda).  When the company plane does indeed crash in the Pacific Ocean the unlikely pair finds themselves stuck together with the possibility of something new growing between them.

And that something new is hatred and mania.

Send Help plays fast and loose with the tropes of this particular romantic fable, starting from the horrific deaths of the passengers on the plane and the increasingly gory encounters Linda survives trying to keep the pair alive initially.  More importantly it immediately defines Bradley through cartoonish villainy and misogony relative to Linda’s seemingly straightforward goodness and dependability. As the days stretch into weeks, the isolation gradually reveals their truer selves, whitling away their outside pretenses – that Bradley’s shitheel exterior hides a shitheel interior while Linda’s kindness can quickly and easily transform into a hardness unwilling to take no for answer.

In different hands it could be a psychological character study, dispensing with romanticism in favor of pure nihilism as it embraces the darkest sides of human nature.  None of that would be remotely as entertaining as what Raimi has put together as he turns to comedy as much as gore in a delicate balancing act most could not pull off.  That is, if the word delicate could be used to describe a film where McAdams must vomit continually all over O’Brien’s face.  But it’s also true, particularly during its messier third act twist when it appears rescuers may have found the island to end the pairs ordeal possibly before Linda is ready for it to.

The only thing worse than not having a dream, it turns out, is having one and watching it taken away.  Within this setup, Raimi and his two very game stars who must carry almost every scene alone, play that thought out not so much to its logical conclusion as much as its most unhinged just to wink and say this is what we really want.  This, in Raimiville, is the reality of the American Dream, one fueled more by monomaniacal desire than belief and which, if threatened, becomes an engine for destruction.

Just the way it should.

7.5 out of 10

Starring Rachel McAdams, Dylan O’Brien, Edyll Ismail, Xavier Samuel and Chris Prang. Directed by Sam Raimi.