The tables turn and turn again in director Sam Raimi’s Send Help, a tale of survival, power imbalance, and possibly female empowerment, depending on what lens you view the story through.

As the trailers for the film would indicate, the film is about Linda Liddle, a mousy corporate strategist, played by a frumped-up Rachel McAdams, who gets passed over for a well-deserved promotion by her new boss Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien), a frat boy jerk who inherited the company from his recently-deceased father (played by a portrait of Raimi regular Bruce Campbell.)

Naturally, O’Brien hasn’t earned the title, just as the vacuous pretty-boy Donovan (Xavier Samuel), a college buddy of Bradley’s, didn’t deserve to get Linda’s promotion. At the beginning of the movie Linda sees Donovan take credit for her hard work in a board meeting from which Linda was disinvited. But Linda and the tuna salad sandwich she was eating at her desk made a bad impression on Bradley, so she gets passed over for the promotion.

However, the do-nothings at the top need Linda’s expertise and way with numbers to secure a big deal overseas, so she is reluctantly invited to join Bradley, Donovan and a couple other of the company’s odious male upper-management creeps on the private jet to the Far East. And that’s where the story really starts.

In a terrifying yet hilarious sequence, the plane crashes into the ocean. Linda, who buckled up as told, unlike the cocky male passengers, survives the crash and finds herself within swimming distance of an island. The next day, she awakens on the beach of a pretty sweet piece of island real estate. After a bit of exploration, she comes upon Bradley, who also washed up onto the shore. But Bradley is in much worse shape than Linda, with a leg injury.

And here’s where the tables first turn. Linda is an amateur survivalist, who had a yen to be a contestant on long-running reality game show Survivor. (Indeed, just before the plane crash, the business bros found Linda’s audition tape online and were actively mocking her desperately sincere but deeply goofy video plea to be on the show.) Getting stuck on the island means it’s Linda’s time to shine.

And shine she does: not only does she build a shelter and find food and water for the two of them as she nurses Bradley back to health, Linda finds she is in her element. In one dramatic (and disgusting) sequence, she even kills a wild boar…and she likes it. A lot. As Bradley lies helpless, Linda thrives, and even undergoes her own desert island makeover, showing off sun-kissed skin, beachy waves in her hair, and her lean, muscular body.

Bradley doesn’t like being in what Linda calls the “submissive” position on the island; he tries to pull rank but finds that here, he has no rank to pull. She’s the boss, because only she knows how to keep them both alive until help comes. And Bradley does want help to come; he has a gorgeous fiancée and business to get back to. But Linda has no spouse or friends, just a pet bird, and it becomes evident to even Bradley that Linda would be happier if they were never rescued.

While all of the above may seem like major spoilers, there truly is a lot more to the story. Though there are other characters in the movie, 95% of the movie is just Linda and Bradley, or Linda vs. Bradley. Both have hidden depths, and both have secrets they are keeping from each other (and from us…both are unreliable narrators whose word cannot be trusted.)

For all its grim setup, random spurts of extreme violence, stomach-turning gore, and psychological terror, Send Help is really an escapist comedy, and not just because of the lovely island setting. The humor here is pitch dark at times and incredibly silly at others, which is what you’d expect from a director that gave us both Tobey Maguire as Spider-Man and the Evil Dead franchise.

McAdams gives a performance that is both sympathetic and disturbing: she’s part Peter Parker and part Green Goblin. And O’Brien’s character transcends his one-dimensional beginning as the boss from hell to become much more nuanced. You might even find yourself rooting for Bradley, once the tables take another spin.

Then again, you might find yourself on Team Linda throughout the entire ordeal. Send Help is definitely a film to see in a theater, preferably with a crowd of fellow horror-humor enthusiasts. There are a few scenes that definitely demand a group reaction to be fully satisfying. In theaters now.