This article was originally published on FearHQ.com.
In Sam Raimi's new horror movie, Send Help, Rachel McAdams plays downtrodden office worker Linda Liddle, who has to contend with her hateful, sexist boss, Dylan O'Brien's Bradley Preston.
Linda has been promised a promotion, but Bradley disagrees and takes great delight in ridiculing her on their flight to Bangkok (where he still expects her to help the company get a merger across the line). The plane runs into difficulty and crashes, seemingly leaving Linda and Bradley as the only survivors on a remote, uninhabited island.
Linda, who once wanted to compete on the reality TV series Survivor, excels in their shared predicament, forcing her boss to rely on her to keep them alive. Secrets are revealed, and Linda's actions become increasingly suspicious and downright sinister. She deliberately hides from a boat that could rescue them and murders Bradley's fiancée, Zuri, and the innocent boat captain by allowing them to step off a cliff.
In Send Help's final act, Bradley discovers what Linda has done and learns that there's a luxury house on the other side of the island stocked with supplies. A fight ensues in the house, which ends with Linda brutally killing him with a golf club.
It's a fitting choice of weapon, as Linda lost her promotion to one of Bradley's golf buddies (he also ridiculed her for not playing the sport and pointed to that being the reason she lost out to his pal).
Later, we find Linda on a golf course. After being rescued, it turns out she's developed a love for the game after bashing her former boss's head in. She's also become a celebrity and has written self-help books about her experiences on the island. Nobody knows what she's done, and she's hailed as a true survivor by the world at large.
While Send Help ends with a victorious Linda driving off into the sunset, she's become even more ruthless than Bradley and, in many ways, is no longer all that different from the undeserving, privileged man she killed.
At the same time, the movie's ending also leans into the extreme lengths someone will go to reclaim power after years of being overlooked at work. It's a dark, thought-provoking ending and one of Raimi's best (it sits at 92% on Rotten Tomatoes).
In Send Help, two colleagues become stranded on a deserted island, the only survivors of a plane crash. On the island, they must overcome past grievances and work together to survive, but ultimately, it's an unsettling, darkly humorous battle of wills and wits to make it out alive.
Send Help is directed by genre-bending visionary Sam Raimi and stars Oscar nominee Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien. The film is produced by Raimi and Zainab Azizi, executive produced by JJ Hook and written by Damian Shannon & Mark Swift, with original music by Danny Elfman.
The all-original darkly comedic psychological thriller from 20th Century Studios is now playing in U.S. theaters.