Looking for plans this weekend? How about watching Rachel McAdams psychologically and physically torture Dylan O’Brien in the new Sam Raimi movie, Send Help, which is now streaming on Hulu, free to subscribers? Don’t worry, he totally deserves it!
Directed by Sam Raimi, with a screenplay written by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, Send Help stars Rachel McAdams as the meek, underappreciated employee of a sexist CEO (O’Brien) who horribly mistreats her. Then the two colleagues’ plane crashes on a deserted island while en route to a work trip. The CEO is injured, and, suddenly, the power dynamics are flipped. It doesn’t hurt that McAdam’s character is a life long Survivor fan. You might say she’s been training her whole life for this. This one is for everyone with a terrible, abusive boss who’s ever harbored a secret revenge fantasy.
This r-rated survival thriller is exactly as wild, gross, and ridiculous as you want it to be. If you didn’t get a chance to see it in theaters, now is your chance to watch it at home on streaming. And if you get to the end of the movie and find yourself confused, don’t worry, because Decider is here to help. Read on for an analysis of the Send Help movie plot summary and Send Help movie ending explained.
Send Help movie plot summary:
Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) works as a Planning & Strategy Department strategist for a financial company, and she’s very good at her job. Unfortunately, she’s also weird, frumpy, and doesn’t wear attractive clothing. She lives alone, is obsessed with Survivor, and her only friend is her pet bird. Because of this, she’s completely overlooked and underappreciated by her asshole boss and newly-appointed-nepo-baby-CEO, Bradley (Dylan O’Brien). Bradley goes back on his promise to give Linda a long-overdue promotion, and instead gives it one of his male buddies. As a consolation to Linda, he invites her to join him and some other high-ranking men on a trip on a business trip to Bangkok.
On the flight, Bradley and the boys unearth Linda’s Survivor audition tape, and laugh at her expense. But she gets the last laugh when the plane crashes into the ocean, and she and Bradley are the only survivors. They wake up on a remote, unpopulated island. Linda is unharmed, but Bradley’s leg is gravely injured, leaving him unable to walk. Linda, leaning on her Survivor skills, builds shelter and gathers food and water for the both of them. She nurses Bradley back to health. But when Bradley starts speaking to her with disrespect, the same way he treated her at the office, she abandons him for two days. Bradley nearly dies from thirst, unable to fend for himself. He reluctantly accepts that Linda is the captain now.
While out foraging, Linda spies a luxury boat on the water. Instead of signaling the boat for help, she hides from it, not ready to leave the island yet. Bradley is starting to heal and is able to walk around on crutches. Linda warns him not to go to a certain side of the island, where a rock formation forms an X, because it is covered in poisonous plants. One day, Linda shows up to their make-shift camp with a sharp kitchen knife she says washed up on the beach. She prepares Bradley a fancy meal of fruit and sushi, complete with moonshine alcohol.
That night, drunk around the fire, Linda and Bradley open up to one another. Bradley talks about his fianceé, Zuri. Linda reveals her former husband was an abusive alcoholic. For years, Linda endured his abuse and saved him from himself by hiding his car keys when he was drunk. But one night, after a big fight, she deliberately left his car keys out on the table. He died that night, in a drunk driving accident.
After the night by the fire, Bradley is extremely nice to Linda and offers to cook her dinner. But it’s soon revealed he poisoned her meal, in the hopes of escaping on his makeshift raft. The raft immediately falls apart in the ocean, and the dosage wasn’t enough to kill Linda. She rescues Bradley from drowning in the ocean. Then she gets revenge on Bradley by tying him up, paralyzing him with octopus venom, and pretending to castrate him. She informs him that no help is coming, and that he needs to accept that she is the boss now. She promises to be a nicer boss than he was to her.
Soon after, Linda is out foraging when she’s spotted by a boat along the coastline. On the boat is Bradley’s fiance Zuri (Edyll Ismail), who hired her own investigator to keep searching for Bradley after the official investigation gave up. Linda leads Zuri and the boat driver up a tall cliff, ostensibly to lead them back to Bradley. She lags behind while Zuri and the driver step onto a spot on the cliff that Linda knows is unstable. When Zuri slips and falls—caught by the driver, who is now slipping, too—Linda doesn’t move to help them to safety. Linda returns to camp alone, and tells Bradley nothing. She withdraws, and claims she’s taking a “sick day.” In her dreams, she’s haunted by the ghost of Zuri.
Bradley tries to hunt on his own, and comes across Zuri’s body, partially buried in the sand. He confronts Linda, who claims it was a accident—that she fell, but she didn’t think Bradley would believe. In fact, Bradley doesn’t believe her. He also stole her knife. He attempts to kill Linda, but after a bloody fight, she gets the better of him. Bradley flees toward the X-shaped rocks that Linda warned him to stay away from.
Upon reaching the rocks, Bradley discovers a luxury home on the cliff. He bangs on the door for help, runs inside, and finds the house fully stocked with food and water, but empty. When he looks for a knife in the silverware drawer, he finds them all gone. Linda’s voice comes on over the house’s security/PA system, where she confesses she discovered this house a long time ago. Remember that boat she saw near the beginning of the movie? It turns out she followed the boat, and saw workers dropping off a food delivery for the house. She broke in after they left, and disabled the security system. The house’s owner, a Wall Street billionaire, has been none the wiser.
That’s where her knife came from, as well as all this luxury fruit she’d been “foraging.” She’s good at Survivor, but not that good! It’s also revealed in a flashback that Linda did not merely neglect to help Zuri and the boat driver, when they were dangling off that cliff side. In fact, when it looked like he might pull Zuri up, Linda bashed the boat driver in the head with a rock, and sent two innocent people falling to their death. That’s no accident!
Send Help movie ending explained:
Linda corners Bradley in the house, with a shot gun pointed to his head. Bradley begs for his life. He apologizes for being “a monster” and swears that Linda has changed him for the better. He tells Linda he loves her and wants to stay on this island to live with her forever. For a second, it seems Linda might be buying it. But then she notices one of the horns on a decorative metal bull is missing. Bradley attacks.
Bradley gets a hold of the gun, points it at Linda, and says, “Bye you crazy bitch from accounting.” But the gun is not loaded. Linda beats Bradley with a golf club. Before she delivers the fatal swing to his head, Linda corrects the mistake Bradley made again and again when it came to Linda’s job at the company: “Strategy and Planning.”
The movie abruptly cuts to a scene nearly one year later, where Linda is golfing at a Celebrity Golf Invitational. In an interview for the local news, we learn that Linda was discovered alone on a raft in the sea nearly one year ago. The official story is that she is the only survivor of the company plane crash. She’s written a best-selling book about her experience, which is soon to be a movie. Next up, Linda says she plans to write a self-help book, to help teach people that “no help is coming. So you better start saving yourself.”
The movie ends with Linda driving along a coastal highway, in a convertible, with her pet bird by her side. Blondie’s hit song “One Way or Another” blasts. Linda shoots a menacing look at the camera, and with that, the movie ends. (Perhaps the use of the Blondie song is a nod to another Rachel McAdams movie, Mean Girls, which uses that same song in a famous montage. Mean Girl McAdams is back!)
So what does it all mean? Well, ultimately, Send Help is a movie about power, authority, and morality. We might like Linda better than Bradley, but when she became his “boss,” she eventually let the power corrupt her. Despite her claims of being a good person, by the end of the movie she has become a murderer of innocent people.
One could also argue Send Help is a movie about the labor women do to save men—be it an employee working for an abusive boss, or a wife keeping an abusive husband alive—and what it means when women stop doing that labor. Is withholding help the same thing as harming some one? We can agree that hitting the boat driver with a rock is murder, but what about Linda leaving Bradley to die of thirst? What about Linda giving her drunk husband his car keys? Is it murder to simply not save someone from themselves?
By the end of the movie, it’s clear Linda believes it’s no longer her moral obligation to help anyone. “No help is coming.”
