[COLUMN] Send Help is a Horror About Those Who Help Themselves | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This piece contains spoilers for Sam Raimi’s Send Help, which is one of the genre delights of this past January. The latest film from Sam Raimi, it’s a nice pulpy survival thriller with two charming central performances and a lot of Raimi’s gnarly sensibility. It’s a good time at the pictures, and it contains a number of big twists. So if you want to see it blind, feel free to bookmark and come back. Otherwise, proceed at your own peril.

Having seen Send Help a couple of times now, with a packed audience each time, it’s very interesting which moments get the largest reaction. Director Sam Raimi knows how to manipulate an audience, how to play with their expectations, knowing when to give them what they want and when to swerve sharply. Send Help is a crowd-pleasing high-concept movie, and its big moments – eye-gougings, boar-stabbings, blood-splatterings – all play like gangbusters in a full house.

Still, there’s one sequence which gets a particularly visceral reaction from every audience. It arrives about two-thirds of the way through, at the transition from the second act into the third. Spoiled trust fund baby Bradley Preston (Dylan O'Brien) has betrayed his subordinate Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams), who had worked very hard to build them shelter and protection on the tropical island where they are stranded. Bradley poisoned Linda, and set out to see on a raft, hoping to be rescued.

Bradley’s escape attempt does not go to plan. His raft is shoddily built, and he was washed back ashore. The following morning, Bradley cries as he acknowledges his failure and his betrayal of Linda. Linda is gentle with him, feeding him toasted octopus to get his strength back. As the paralytic agent in the octopus sets in, Linda begins sterilizing her trusty knife. Pulling down Bradley’s trousers, she relates a story about the misbehaving dog she owned as a kid; a dog who “just needs to be fixed.”

What follows is an incredibly intense sequence as the camera remains focused on Linda and Bradley’s faces as Linda places the knife between Bradley’s legs and starts cutting. Blood splatters across both of them. At every screening I have attended, the audience falls deathly silent during this beat, as Linda goes about her work and Bradly tries to scream through paralyzed lips. It’s a moment that really pushes the film and the audience. There’s a real are they going there? energy to it.

Ultimately, in a smart decision, they are not going there. Send Help is a fun pulpy mainstream thriller, and depicting an actual castration would tip the movie into a sort of graphic sadism that would alienate an audience who were there for a good time. Linda reveals that the blood splatter is from a drugged vermin that she had gutted for theatrical effect. “See? It’s just a rat,” she reassured Bradley, holding the creature up for display. She leans in to whisper, “Next time, it won’t be.”

It’s a really effective beat, because it serves to foreground one of the film’s primary thematic concerns. Gender – and particularly masculinity – is a major recurring concern for the film, from its opening moments. Send Help begins with Bradley assuming control of his company following the death of his father (Bruce Campbell). His father had promised the hyper-competent Linda, who still sits among the female secretaries, a promotion to the role of Vice-President.

Bradley is disgusted by Linda from the moment that he encounters her on the walk to his new office. It’s implied that at least part of this visceral reaction is down to the fact that Linda doesn’t conform to more traditional standards of femininity. Bradley passes her over for the role of Vice-President, instead handing the job to his old frat buddy Donovan (Xavier Samuel), despite the advice of his senior executive Franklin (Dennis Haysbert).

Almost immediately, Send Help places a great deal of emphasis on Bradley’s performance of a certain kind of corporate masculinity. His speech is gendered and vulgar. When Linda storms his office to object to Donovan’s promotion, he acknowledges that he is a little impressed, that such a move “took real balls.” As the team boards his private jet, he instructs, “Cocks in the air.” As the plane hits turbulence, he goads his toadies, “Fasten your seatbelts. If you’re a fucking pussy!”

When Linda does work up the courage to confront Bradley in his office, she interrupts an interview with an attractive young woman (Olivia Sawyer). “How above and beyond would you be willing to go for me?” Bradley asks as he leans on the desk in front of her, hands on his belt buckle. The implication is not exactly subtle. Similarly, after shaking Linda’s hands, Bradley insists that Franklin smell his fingers and complains about the “noxious odors” of tuna fish coming from Linda’s desk.

Of course, Send Help understands that this is all just posturing. It is a façade. Bradley is not some stereotype “alpha male.” He is the head of a consulting firm. In their meeting, Franklin acknowledges the absurdity and abstraction of what they do, “a consulting firm hiring a consulting firm.” Tellingly, when Bradley mocks the idea of putting on a seatbelt, he still fastens his own seatbelt. Indeed, Bradley survives the plane crash because he fastens his seatbelt.

Trapped on the island with Linda, Bradley is almost immediately emasculated. He is rendered helpless, lying on the beach all day and complaining about what the sun is doing to his skin. In a beat that would be ironic even without the symbolism, Linda force-feeds him fish. Bradley is presented as an object of desire, with Linda spying on him as he washes himself naked in the surf. Bradley becomes a figure of desire for Linda, and takes on domesticated chores.

In contrast, once the pair arrive on the island, Linda embraces a very masculine world view. She is rarely seen without a phallic spear or knife. She impales a boar on her trusty stick, literally “bringing home the bacon.” She looms over Bradley. “You ever hunt, Bradley?” she asks, covered in blood. “I… I think I like it.” The power dynamics are reversed. After Bradley storms away from the camp, he is forced to return humiliated, begging her to take him back. “Step into my office,” she teases.

The implication of all this is clear. Linda has embraced a similar sort of masculinity to the kind Bradley was performing back at the office. Indeed, as Bradley begs to be taken back, Linda emphasizes the role reversal. “How above and beyond would you be willing to go for me?” she teases. Bradley understands the implication, climbing to his feet and starting to strip off. She lets the humiliation linger for a moment, before stopping him. “I would never,” she clarifies. “I’m not like you.”

Linda is correct, to an extent. She is not like Bradley, but only because she offers a much more convincing performance of this archetypal masculinity. As she prepares to castrate him, Linda observes, “I’m a much better boss than you would have been.” She is technically correct. She is a much more efficient and effective embodiment of the values that Bradley had embraced in his short tenure as head of the company. A better boss is not a better person.

Send Help is in many ways a critique of American capitalism. The film’s central thematic engine is the juxtaposition of the Darwinist “law of the jungle” that defines so much contemporary corporate culture with actual survival in the wilderness. After all, the rhetoric of the market is one of “bulls”, “wolves” and “bears.” It’s no coincidence that the climax of the movie finds the pair fighting in the island home of “some Wall Street billionaire” adorned with bull sculptures.

Send Help is about the rugged myth of American individualism. The film’s ironic emphasis on the idea of “help” is quite clever. Central to the film is the idea that there is no help, and that everybody is ultimately out for themselves. Bradley tries to break away from Linda multiple times, the third time poisoning her and leaving her on the beach as he tries to sail away. There is a sense that everybody is out for themselves, and responsible only to themselves.

There is a doctrine in European law, “the duty to rescue”, that imposes a liability on individuals in certain circumstances to help one another. This concept is alien to American legal theory, where the law exists primarily to impose boundaries that protect the individual rather than encourage a cohesive society. Linda summarizes this position in the film’s final moments, as she boasts of her plans to write a self help book. “No help is coming,” she explains. “You have to save yourself.”

There is an interesting arc for Linda over the film, as this self-interest evolves in deliberate and unsettling ways. Around the midpoint of the movie, Linda confesses to Bradley that she was married to an abusive man. He died in a drink-driving accident, but the twist is that it was Linda who gave him his car keys. Linda did not kill him, but she enabled his death. She did not help him. It’s an ambiguous beat. Did Linda do anything wrong? Did Linda owe her abusive husband anything?

The next death that Linda is involved in is more direct. At the start of the third act, Bradley’s fiancée Zuri (Edyll Ismail) finds the pair on the island with the aid of a Thai boat captain (Thaneth Warakulnukroh). Walking the pair back to the camp, Linda guides them to a precarious rock formation. Zuri slips, dangling over the cliff edge. The Thai captain grabs her. “Help us!” he screams. “Help us!” Linda remains frozen in place, watching them. The sequence fades slowly to black.

A few days later, Bradley discovers Zuri’s body. He confronts Linda. She insists she did not kill Zuri. In an interesting choice, Linda is not technically lying. Linda did not kill Zuri. She instead killed the Thai boat captain, which sent him and Zuri tumbling over the cliff. It’s a decidedly less ambiguous situation than the death of her husband, but it is worded very carefully and deliberately. This builds to a beautiful gnarly fight sequence in which Linda kills Bradley with a golf club.

There is a sense that this myth of individualism is a lie, that this belief that nobody owes anything to anybody but themselves inevitably builds to a culture of competition and violence – and that the line between passive observer and active participant is thinner than one might think. Indeed, one of the more fun third act twists is the reveal that Linda discovered the billionaire’s house quite early during their stay on the island.

While Linda undoubtedly has survival skills, demonstrated in their early days on the island, a large portion of her thriving on the island comes down to the advantage of having access to a fully stocked and provisioned mansion. This rugged survivalism is itself a sort of performance, a bit of play acting. Linda is not quite as different from Bradley as she might want to think. Bradley inherited his company from his father. A large part of Linda’s success on the island is due to an anonymous billionaire.

Send Help makes a fine companion piece to Sam Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell. While Raimi had been trying to make Drag Me to Hell for years, the film arrived in 2009 as a perfect commentary on Great Recession America. It focused on bank loan officer Christine Brown (Alison Lohman), so desperate to advance her professional status that she forecloses on the house of an old woman (Lorna Raver) who in turn curses her. Christine’s cruelty is presented as a necessary price to get ahead.

Both Send Help and Drag Me to Hell feel like wry commentaries on the “girlboss” era, that weird moment in history where audiences were encouraged to root for empowered women in industry, a value-neutral feminism that celebrated the idea that women in business could be just as awful as the men around them. Send Help ends with Linda driving a sports car, blaring Blondie’s “One Way or the Other” on the soundtrack, and staring directly into the camera at the audience, implicating us.

In the parlance of the times, this ending evokes the #GoodForHer approach of films like Midsommar or MaXXXine. However, there is an ambivalence there. In the passenger seat of Linda’s car, she has placed her beloved bird Sweetie. Sweetie sits in a gilded cage. Has Linda really liberated herself or just constructed her own gilded cage? It’s a very smart closing image from the film, and it gets at the meaty ideas beneath the fun thrill ride.

“You ever hear the expression, monsters aren’t born, they’re made?” Linda asks Bradley at one point. She is talking about their cycles of abuse; Linda suffering at the hands of her husband, Bradley at the hands of his mother, who suffered at the hands of her father. It’s a small touch, but it’s quite clever that Linda and Bradley both find surrogate abusers on the island. Bradley is another abusive husband for Linda. Linda is another abusive mother for Bradley.

However, there is also a broader sense that Linda is talking about larger social structures. In their own ways, Linda and Bradley are the monsters that capitalism has made them, the products of a broken and savage corporate culture. Linda is just a stronger, better sort of monster than Bradley. Linda suffered under the Man, but only survived by becoming the Man.