To help finalize a company merger, meek and awkward corporate strategist Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) gets on a flight to Bangkok with her boss and colleagues. The plane never arrives at its destination, but for Linda, the journey is transformative. Stranded on a remote island in the Gulf of Thailand in the aftermath of a crash, the wilderness nurtures a realization that the cutthroat world of corporate politics might never have acknowledged: she’s a survivor.
Sam Raimi’s “Send Help” makes for an excellent double bill with Wes Craven’s “Red Eye” (2005), in which friendly hotel manager Lisa Reisert (McAdams) is targeted by her co-passenger on a flight, revealed to be a terrorist. The (subtly named) Jack Rippner (Cillian Murphy) works for an organization planning to assassinate a major political figurehead; he needs Lisa to authorize the target’s reassignment to a designated room at her hotel to facilitate the attack. If she doesn’t comply, he tells her, her father will be killed. Released more than 20 years apart, the dark comedy and psychological thriller have much in common. A dangerous flight? Check. An imperilled Rachel McAdams character? Check. A triumphant turning of the tables? Check.
In both “Send Help” and “Red Eye,” McAdams’ women work thankless customer service or data analysis jobs, either dealing with belligerent, entitled guests or doing grunt work that male colleagues breezily take credit for. They also suffer from past trauma — whether an unhappy marriage and the death of a spouse, or a grievous assault — and are loners, despite being endlessly accommodating people pleasers. They possess a vulnerability that makes them appear like easy targets. What both films also share is a canny grasp of gender dynamics, particularly of toxic men who seek to wield their power over these women by weaponizing either their professional authority, physical strength, or manufactured perception.
Take the scene in which Jack fobs off Lisa’s attempts to alert an airhostess to his terror plot by threatening to paint her as “emotionally unstable, inebriated…crazy”. Given his well-practiced composure and the tears streaming down her face (out of abject fear for her father’s life), it’s dismally obvious who’s more likely to be believed. In both films, the men demonstrate just how much control they wield over these women’s fate. Just as Jack overpowers Lisa in the airplane bathroom with ease, choking her until she nearly passes out, Linda’s boss, Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien) — the only other survivor of the crash — cruelly implies that he’s her only chance of getting off the island since he’s the important one and no one would be looking for her.
The aircraft settings of both films play a key role — if the cramped close quarters of economy class provide no respite from Jack’s antagonistic presence and Lisa’s window seat means he has her boxed in, the luxe spaciousness of a private jet isolates Linda from Bradley and her male colleagues, who cluster together to mock her, callous enough to do so in earshot. The office space is no different; there, they’ve formed a Boys Club, effectively shutting her out. Though Linda’s work is crucial, Bradley sees her as dispensable, awarding the promotion she was promised to a colleague from his old college frat instead, and intending to transfer her to a dead-end post.
The film gradually reverses these dynamics and reassigns traditional gender roles, once Linda and Bradley find themselves trapped on the island — while she, a “Survivor” enthusiast, brings home the bacon (literally, by slaughtering and cooking a wild hog), he moans about his delicate skin being sunburned. Linda patching up Bradley becomes an extension of her cleaning up her male colleagues’ messes back at the office. Her teaching him survival skills and even cooking for him is yet another example of how she’s had to spoon-feed the men at work. It chafes at the CEO to have to take orders from a subordinate, but, as the movie spells out, particularly from a woman. “You’re a slave to your biology,” Linda deadpans. She understands all too well.
The men in both movies alternate overt hostility with a different approach. Bradley charms Linda by cooking her dinner, only to poison her meal and attempt to flee the island on a makeshift raft, leaving her to die. Likewise, “Red Eye” starts as a meet-cute between Jack and Lisa before morphing into a thriller. He backs her up when she calls out a fellow passenger for being rude to airline staff, seems genuinely interested in her, and handles rejection well when she turns down his invite to grab a bite together. “I didn’t mean to invade your personal space,” he says, apologetic, though his words are reframed as a blatant lie when he follows her into the flight bathroom later in the film, or when he slams her head back against the plane window and knocks her out cold in her seat. All that put-on chivalry has curdled. Language, too, becomes laden with misogyny.
Bradley belittles Linda’s lifesaving maneuvers by dubbing her “Suzy Homemaker”, just as Jack mocks Lisa’s “female-driven, emotion-based dilemma”, juxtaposing it against the “male-driven, fact-based logic” that he claims to operate on. Lisa, as it turns out, is actually more clear-headed than Jack gave her credit for. In one scene, she convincingly pretends to have told the hotel to make the room change, only for Jack to discover that the phone lines are down. Later, she thinks quickly by nabbing a pen off a sleeping passenger’s tray, then stabbing the terrorist in the throat with it once the plane lands, slipping away and posing as a service worker to blend in and evade airport security.
Like “Red Eye’s” meet-cute, “Send Help,” too, employs rom-com elements — having Linda and Bradley cuddle in a cave during a storm — only to subvert genre expectations. The only time the lead pair’s mouths are brought close to each other is while she’s resuscitating him after his botched escape attempt (whilst also throwing up on him). The only time she unzips his pants is when she pretends to castrate him after having temporarily paralyzed him with a concoction of local toxins. Her point is clear: she’s the one in charge now. She takes to calling him “Sweetie”, but that’s the name of her cockatiel back home. Bradley’s been conferred with the status of a pet and trained to behave.
By the end, the desperate, grovelling CEO tells Linda he loves her, promising her a “fairytale” in an attempt to placate her with false hope, only to attack her. It doesn’t work. She beats him to death with a golf club, equipment of the very activity he condescendingly suggested she take up earlier in the film, so as to become more of a “people person.” Like her, Lisa too finally sees her tormentor for who he is, fear turning to apathy when she discovers that Jack has followed her home. She calls him “pathetic” and fires at him with the same gun his hired assassin would’ve used on her father.
While “Red Eye” ends with Lisa’s dad rescuing her, “Send Help” advocates for self-reliance, with Linda ultimately escaping the island and parlaying her experiences into a thriving self-help career. Her parting words are a cheeky rejoinder: no one is coming, save yourself. From the wreckage of two harrowing trips, the resourceful heroines of Raimi and Craven’s double bill emerge intact, the process of rebuilding their lives well underway.
Have you seen “Send Help” yet? If so, what did you think? What about “Red Eye?” Please share your thoughts in the comments section below or on our X account.
