‘Send Help’ is a film that wrong-foots its audience, and quite sharply. For the first stretch it plays like a glossy, 1980s-style workplace satire, in the mode of ‘Working Girl’ or ‘American Psycho’ – all alpha posturing, casual misogyny, and a corporate ladder rigged in favour of the loudest man in the room. Then it strands its two leads on a desert island and flips the power dynamic with a wicked little grin.

Rachel McAdams is the quietly competent employee who’s spent years being talked over. Dylan O’Brien is her boss – entitled, performative, and convinced he still ‘runs things’ even when there’s no office, no HR, and no audience. The early fun comes from watching him discover that hierarchy doesn’t survive contact with real survival. Off the grid, it’s McAdams’ resourcefulness that matters, and she thrives in a way that clearly unsettles him – and, intriguingly, seems to awaken something in her too.

For a while you think you’re watching a ‘Cast Away’ variation: hold out, get rescued, return to civilisation, maybe even a neat little ‘she gets the promotion’ payoff. But the film has other ideas. It becomes increasingly clear that island life suits McAdams’ character far more than the world she came from – and that staying put might be less a nightmare than a liberation.

Then, about halfway through, ‘Send Help’ mutates into something nastier: splattery survival horror with a mean streak. The food-gathering turns grotesque, the tone curdles, and the film leans into a pulpy, juvenile excess. There are ‘Misery’ echoes too – O’Brien’s character ends up injured and immobilised, McAdams builds him shelter, tends to him… and starts meting out punishments when he won’t ‘toe the line.’ Care and control blur in deliberately uncomfortable ways.

It’s basically a bloodier cousin of ‘9 to 5’: same premise of patriarchal comeuppance, but filtered through body horror and cruelty rather than farce. There’s some fun in the escalation – the way it pivots from blandly predictable to properly vicious – but it never quite becomes more than its own contrivance. The transformation at the end is certainly a shift, but it feels engineered by the plot’s cruelty rather than earned as a deep character arc.

Still, if you like films that start as one thing and then gleefully pull the rug, ‘Send Help’ will keep you watching – even if you’re wincing while you do.