Send Help Lets Rachel McAdams Go Full Bruce Campbell and it’s Amazing

This post contains light spoilers for Send Help.

Midway through Send Help, Rachel McAdams hunts a wild boar. Her character Linda Liddle lures the beast into a clearing and pounces from above, stabbing the creature with her spear. The boar bucks and charges as it fights back, continuing to drive toward Linda even after being impaled. As it rages forward, the boar spews blood and bile and foam, dousing Linda with viscera. The baptism only elates, and she greets the gore with wide, wild eyes and an open-mouthed smile.

If anyone didn’t realize that Sam Raimi-directed Send Help, the boar killing sequence would obliterate all doubt. Only the mad genius behind the Evil Dead franchise could construct a scene at once both so terrifying and so absurd. Raimi’s commitment to dread and disorder transformed his childhood friend Bruce Campbell into a B-movie legend. And with Send Help, he gets the Academy Award-nominated McAdams to unleash her inner chaos demon.

Raimi’s Helping Hand

Send Help has a delicious premise from screenwriting duo Mark Swift and Damian Shannon (Freddy vs Jason). McAdams’s Linda Liddle is the office weirdo, talented enough with numbers to be valuable to the company but too awkward to make friends. When condescending rich kid Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien) inherits the company from his father, he callously denies her promised promotion but agrees to bring her on a business trip to China—provided that she can write up a report during the flight. Linda does not finish the report, in part because Bradley decides to mock her very sincere Survivor audition video and in part because the plane crashes, stranding the two of them on a deserted island.

There, Linda gets the upper hand as her much-mocked Survivor skills allow her to not only quickly make camp on the beach, but also nurse Bradley back to health. As they begin to realize that her skills—and his utter lack thereof—reverse the duo’s power dynamics, Linda and Bradley resort to increasingly disturbing tactics to keep control over one another.

While that set-up could make for a tense thriller, psychological never been Raimi’s bailiwick. From his debut The Evil Dead in 1981 through his genre-defining Spider-Man movies in the 2000s to his return to superheroes with Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Raimi is all about bombastic, bloody violence—The Texas Chainsaw Massacre by way of The Three Stooges.

Raimi started his career with the ideal leading man for his vision, having grown up with Bruce Campbell in his native Michigan. The tall, handsome Campbell accepted the punishment that Raimi dished out, whether it be smashing plates on his face, spinning around while strapped to a rig, or just laughing maniacally on camera for what must have seemed like hours.

Raimi’s tried to do the same with other actors. His Spider-Man films punished Tobey Maguire more than any other on-screen version of the wall-crawler and Alison Lohman spent all of Drag Me to Hell getting sprayed with rain, saliva, and blood. But no one has come close to matching Campbell’s commitment to the Raimi vision. No one, until Rachel McAdams in Get Help.

McAdams Makes Mayhem

When we first meet Linda in Send Help, she’s a mousy office lady, as oblivious to her co-workers’ cold shoulders as she is to the globs of tuna fish stuck to her face after lunch. McAdams leans into the bit, not just by obscuring her movie star looks with frumpy sweaters and ratty hair, but also by adopting the spindly posture of an old maid and making her million-dollar-smile feel discomfiting. On the island, McAdams gradually plays the character with more confidence and even glamour, showing that Linda has found her element.

Even more impressive than the character’s transformation is the fearlessness that McAdams brings to the part. In Send Help‘s most memorable scene, Linda paralyzes Bradley and threatens to do the unthinkable to him (don’t worry, we won’t spoil it here). As she explains to Bradley the process and her rationale, Linda’s sweet Midwesterner disposition becomes unhinged, her eyes widening after every sentence and her smile holding for a few seconds too long.

Elsewhere in the movie, Linda gets to luxuriate in a waterfall and, by the end of the film, events and elements seem to transform her into one of the Deadites from Evil Dead. McAdams remains completely committed throughout, never once showing restraint or self-consciousness. Whether she’s asked to look silly or scary, beautiful or bedraggled, McAdams gives it her all.

Impressive as her performance in Send Help is, McAdams’s work as Linda is all the more amazing in light of her full filmography. McAdams broke out playing queen bee Regina George in Mean Girls and solidified her star status in The Notebook, both generational films. Since then, she’s delivered incredible performances in thrillers such as Red Eye and romantic comedies like About Time, and she earned an Academy Award nomination for playing a reporter in Spotlight. Despite more than two decades of great work on screen, audiences are still surprised when she nails comedy beats in Game Night and Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga or plays the nuances in a light drama such as Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.

Bruce Status

Beyond the gunk and ooze, the pleasure of Send Help comes from watching a perpetual victim come into her own. There’s a power fantasy element that continues throughout the movie, even as Linda goes to extremes that the average viewer would rather avoid.

About the time that Bradley concedes that he’s underestimated Linda, we viewers have the same realization about McAdams. We’ve always known that she’s a good actress, and we’ve liked her almost everything. But when she guts a pig with gooey gusto, we realize that she’s ascended to another level. Sure, McAdams has always been funny and convincing and compelling on screen. But now, she’s put in a Bruce Campbell-worthy performance in a Sam Raimi movie, and that is truly something special.

Send Help is playing in theaters worldwide.