Rachel McAdams is the world’s gnarliest survivor in Sam Raimi’s Send Help

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Send Help

Directed by Sam Raimi

Written by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift

Starring Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien

Classification 14A; 113 minutes

Opens in theatres Jan. 30

Last December, Survivor fans were treated during the broadcast of the show’s 49th finale to a trailer for Send Help, a horror-comedy set on a deserted island, directed by Sam Raimi (Evil Dead, Spider-Man).

The Survivor connection was immediately intriguing: Send Help’s central character, Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams), is a super-fan of the reality-TV series. Her bookshelf is full of survival manuals and field guides and texts on wild edibles; she has even auditioned for the show. (I have, too, Linda!)

But only Linda’s pet bird has seen this outdoorsy side of her, because at work she’s the office mouse, oblivious to the smudge of tuna on her face when painfully interacting at the proverbial watercooler.

She’s in “strategy and planning,” as she needs to remind her chauvinist boss Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien), who egregiously overlooks Linda’s expert output at work to the point of passing her over for a promotion. His idea of a consolation prize for Linda, wrapped in an office politics mind game, involves still more work: accompanying Bradley and the boys’ club to Thailand on the private jet. Which nosedives! Horrifically!

Suddenly marooned on an island, the office crew is down to a tribe of two. But now little ol’ Linda has the conch and Bradley is as useless in the wild as he is at work. Obnoxiously, he is also quick to assume that they’re both still on the clock within the same power dynamic, setting up the classic who’s-really-on-the-bottom reversal that so often occurs on Survivor.

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Ah, but something else happens often in the series, which is the “Survivor glow-up,” a miraculous transformation that players exhibit in the crucible of castaway life. Contestants shed both weight and emotional baggage, and many leave the island changed as human beings. So the moment in which Linda finds herself living her Survivor audition-tape dream, she is instantly the hot girl who only needed to take off her glasses.

Trope-y as Send Help’s conceit is, it is also exceptionally believable, as Survivor host Jeff Probst could tell you. Once Linda’s trial by fire-making begins, her eager-beaver bushcrafting makes for many great visual gags. Before long, however, stretches of Send Help remind you of a mid-season episode of another castaway drama, ABC’s Lost – specifically of that show’s sometimes meandering conversations about life back in reality.

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Television is a wild scene these days, though. Keep in mind that a standard episode of Survivor was extended to 90 minutes in recent years; Send Help approaches two hours.

Survivor might see someone getting bit by an extremely venomous sea krait, requiring emergency medical attention. Send Help bares its fangs, too, though some of its best beats are things we’ve seen elsewhere, with little new to truly blindside. Even a bloody battle between Linda and a wild boar fails to compare to when that actually happened on Survivor two-and-a-half decades ago.

Will that matter to people who don’t watch, don’t remember and don’t care about a show that is now up to its 50th season? Maybe not, as Send Help delivers and skewers a basic truth: Work sucks. It’s fun to see bad bosses get their comeuppance, and winter is bitterly cold outside. Why not crash with McAdams and O’Brien for some juicy table-turning power dynamics?

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Those who do will enjoy Raimi’s confident-as-ever direction, as the comic-horror maestro behind Drag Me to Hell brings to theatres another ideal date-night movie. But there’s an unshakeable feeling that there could have been a lot more here in, preferably, a little less.

In terms of what you’d expect from Raimi outside the madness of the Marvel-verse, there is nothing any more wince-inducing in Send Help than, say, the ad hoc dentistry scene of Robert Zemeckis’ Cast Away, which is also more than two decades old.

That’s not to call the most feral moments of Send Help tame – just tidy, digitally, and perhaps damningly so. It’s all presented in a bright, glossy package, with performers physically game for eating bugs and other gross-outs that lead to jungle-adjacent delirium. Cartoon gore and blood aside, though, it’s not like we don’t get that on select Wednesday nights, with real Linda Liddles and real Bradley Prestons. And real bugs.