Abhiroop Das
Directed by Sam Raimi, ‘Send Help’ follows two characters who cannot be farther apart from each other in terms of backgrounds and personalities, but still end up together after a plane crash. Linda Liddle is the most competent employee at Bradley Preston’s company, and yet he shows no signs of ever giving her work its due recognition. However, their dynamic shifts overnight after a plane crash leaves them stranded on a remote island. What Bradley doesn’t know is that Linda is a superfan of the show ‘Survivor’ and has just about every survival tip and technique imprinted into her brain.
All of a sudden, Linda assumes control of the duo and begins showing an abusive side that unnerves Bradley at best, and makes him fear for his life at worst. By the end of this survival horror–thriller movie, Linda’s desires and actions simply go beyond recognition, forcing us to doubt everything we know and feel about her as a character. SPOILERS AHEAD.
Linda’s Desire For Complete and Utter Control Stems From Her Traumatic Past
Though Linda ends the story of ‘Send Help’ with quite the kill count, her actions cannot be considered outright evil. Instead, what we get is a haunting portrait of someone who was rejected and belittled by her society at every turn, until she snapped. From the start, Linda’s individuality becomes the subject of ridicule at her workplace, potentially the only place where she gets to show off her technical genius. However, even here, she is hardly ever acknowledged, with opportunists like Donovan stealing her credit. As such, her psychological transformation on the island comes after she is presented with what is essentially a second shot at life. In an environment where everyone feels out of place, Linda gets to put all her niche skills to use and assume a position of power for the first time ever.
What makes Linda’s actions on the island particularly abusive is her decision not to leave even when help arrives. It is one thing for her to stay back, but things go wrong when she makes that decision for Bradley without his consent. This happens because, without Bradley, she has no one left to exercise control, which makes the island’s entire appeal disappear. It is not the survivalist aspect of this new life that prompts her to take horrific steps, but rather, a desperate desire to preserve control, either by hoarding resources or by outright killing those who stand in her path. While this gives her a narcissistic characteristic, her mindset never quite aligns with the archetypal understanding of antisocial personality disorders.
Linda’s Husband Died in an Accident That She Anticipated, But Didn’t Cause
While Linda’s time on the island acts as a catalyst for her descent into darkness, a particular chapter from her life reveals how past trauma factors into all of this. During a heart-to-heart conversation with Bradley, Linda reveals that she was married once, but it was to an abusive partner. Though we don’t know much about her ex-husband, we learn that he had an alcohol addiction, which manifested in his toxic behavior towards her and others. As a general rule, Linda used to hide the car keys when he got particularly drunk, but that changed one night, when he did something she doesn’t even wish to recall out loud.
It is possible that Linda’s words in that moment imply physical abuse or something worse, but something changed after that fateful night. When her ex-husband asked her for the car keys, this time Linda handed them to him, while also pouring him an additional drink. This turned out to be a fatal course of action, as her ex-husband soon died in a car accident, ending that chapter of her life for good.
Though Linda technically has no involvement in her ex-husband’s death, Bradley taunts her by claiming that she orchestrated the events that led to the accident. In doing so, however, he willingly ignores the context that he himself acknowledged during the original conversation and makes assumptions about Linda’s intent in those moments. While it is true that her murder of Zuri, the sailor, and eventually Bradley, is driven by malicious reasons, her ex-husband’s death reflects one of the many times that she survived extreme abuse, forced to take in a warped perspective of how social dynamics function.
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