Send Help's Twist Is Awfully Similar to a Recent Best Picture Nominee

"It's hard to watch without feeling an intense twinge of déjà vu. Sam Raimi's desert-island-set horror film is a deliberate throwback to a bygone era of thrillers - the Danny Elfman score, shoddy CGI, and surface-level gender politics can't help but provoke warm '90s nostalgia. But there's another, more recent point of comparison lurking just beneath the surface for much of the movie's run. By the time Send Help reaches its inevitable twist, you have to wonder if writers Damian Shannon and Mark Swift were paying intentional homage to 2022 Best Picture nominee Triangle of Sadness, or if this is simply a case of twisted minds thinking alike."

"In terms of its basic setup, Send Help has little in common with Ruben Östlund's Palme d'Or-winning film. Rachel McAdams stars as Linda Liddle, a socially awkward and widely disrespected employee at a company headed by sexist nepo-baby CEO Bradley Preston (Dylan O'Brien). Despite the fact that Bradley's father had promised Linda a promotion to VP, Bradley hands the role to his underqualified frat brother instead. Linda is not the right kind of people person for the job, Bradley tells her - and yes, Send Help's insistence that McAdams's character is frumpy and repellant requires more suspension of disbelief than anything else in the movie."

Send Help is a desert-island-set horror that leans into 1990s thriller aesthetics, featuring a Danny Elfman score, deliberately shoddy CGI, and surface-level gender politics. The film follows Linda Liddle, a socially awkward employee denied a promised promotion by CEO Bradley Preston and ostracized by colleagues on a private plane. Extreme weather crashes the plane, leaving Linda and Bradley as the only survivors on a seemingly deserted island in the Gulf of Thailand. Linda immediately demonstrates effective survival skills, crafting shelter, collecting water, making a fire, and cooking. The movie frames a karmic setup and an inevitable twist that invites comparison to Triangle of Sadness.

Read at Vulture