Sam Raimi's Send Help looks like a two-person survival story: a plane goes down, an employee and her boss wash up on a deserted island, and they have to get along or die. About halfway through, it quietly stops being that movie. The island is not the trap. The office is, and Linda has been running the office the whole time.
One warning before the rest: this walks straight through the twist and the final scene, so bail here if you have not watched. For everyone who finished it, the short answer: Linda survives, kills Bradley, and walks off the island into the corner office she was denied. The horror was never the wilderness. It was the promotion.
The Setup: Two Survivors, One Grudge
Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) is a downtrodden corporate strategist who has been promised a promotion for years. Bradley Preston (Dylan O'Brien) is the son of her old boss, freshly installed as CEO, and the man holding that promotion just out of reach. When their plane crashes and the two of them turn out to be the only survivors, the film sells the usual premise: enemies forced to cooperate against nature. Linda takes charge, seems to know the terrain, warns Bradley away from one part of the island she says is dangerous. He spends the first stretch grateful to her. That gratitude is the setup for everything that follows.
The Twist: The Island Was Never Empty
The forbidden part of the island is not dangerous. It holds a fully equipped luxury home, and Linda knew it was there before the crash. She had taken control of the security cameras, so while Bradley believed the two of them were roughing it as equals, she was watching him move through the house on monitors, managing what he saw and what he did not. The survival ordeal he thinks he is enduring is a set she is dressing, complete with the rationed food and the staged dangers. This is where the movie shows its hand: Linda is not adapting to a disaster. She engineered a stage where the power between them finally runs the other way. Every kindness she showed him in the first act reads differently now, as a move on a board he could not see.
The Empty Gun, and the Golf Club
The rescue that should end the nightmare only widens it. When Bradley's fiancee Zuri arrives by boat to save him, Linda spots her, walks Zuri and the boat guide to a cliff, and pushes them both off, clearing the last people who could take Bradley back. Then comes the scene the whole film was built toward. In the mansion, Linda draws a gun on Bradley. He begs, professes his love, and in the same breath snatches the weapon and tries to shoot her. The gun is empty. That was the test: she wanted to see whether the man who claimed to love her would kill her the second he had the chance, and he did. Having proven it to herself, she beats him to death with a golf club. I think the golf club is the sharpest choice in the film, and the movie knows it. Bradley's family built their fortune on the country-club version of business, the handshakes and the back nine, and the heir dies under a club on a course of Linda's making. The game he was raised inside is the thing that finishes him.
Where Linda Ends Up
A year after the rescue, Linda has not been punished. She is the CEO of Bradley's family company, the role she was owed and denied. A celebrity survivor now, she has published a bestselling memoir about her ordeal, so the official record of what happened is the one written in her own hand. The last images show her playing golf for charity and riding in a chauffeured car with her pet bird, serene, untouchable, the golf club now a photo op. The island did not change her. It gave her the one place where the usual rules did not apply, and she used it to rewrite who ends up on top. That is why the survival framing is a feint: the film is a corporate revenge fantasy wearing a disaster movie, and the disaster was the excuse.
Is It Worth Watching?
Yes, more than its premise promises. Send Help is Raimi working in a tighter, meaner register than his big horror swings, and McAdams is the reason it lands: she plays Linda as pitiable, then capable, then frightening, without ever telling you where the line was. The film also shot an alternate ending, which tells you Raimi weighed how far to take her, and the version he kept is the colder one. It runs efficient, it is often funny in places, and the twist rewards a second look at everything Linda does in the first hour. If you only know it as the island movie with the plane crash, the real subject is sitting in the boardroom.