'Send Help' Proves Sam Raimi Is Still the Master of Gooey Chaos
Sam Raimi is back in top form with Send Help, an ooey and very gooey survival thriller-cum-social satire which finds the veteran filmmaker operating in classic fashion.
Send Help Is a Ferocious, Gory Survival Satire
Rachel McAdams is Linda Liddle, a brilliant but disrespected accountant at a massive company recently taken over by Bradley (Dylan O’Brien) after the death of his father (Raimi regular Bruce Campbell, in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo). Despite her penchant for eating fragrant tuna sandwiches in the office, a slight which earns complaints from her co-workers, Linda is recruited to join Bradley and his fellow bros on a business trip. When the crew’s small airplane crashes over the ocean, Linda and Bradley number the only survivors and must fight to stay alive on a remote island. As the power dynamics drastically shift in Linda’s favor, she decides it might be nice to stay in her new island paradise.
It Heralds a Return to Form for Legendary Director Sam Raimi
Raimi, the filmmaker best known for basically inventing the splatter genre and the superhero blockbuster with The Evil Dead (1980) Spider-Man (2002), respectively. Though he has produced a series of so-so horrors through his Ghost House banner and returned to the Evil Dead universe with the series Ash vs. the Evil Dead, Send Help marks the first time in 33 years (since 1993’s Army of Darkness) that Raimi has directed a full-throated horror picture of the sort for which he became known. After his last two features–Oz the Great and Powerful (2013) and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022)–Send Help marks a triumphant return for Raimi. It’s not only his best movie in decades, it may be the purest Sam Raimi movie ever made.
McAdams is particularly sharp here, crafting a spiky character who’s sympathetic while being as ruthless as her male counterparts. She and a delightfully skeevy O’Brien play a terrifically demented double act. While Send Help calls most directly back to adventure serials of the 1930s and ‘40s, especially in Danny Elfman’s thrumming score, Raimi also packs in allusions to zombie pictures, ghost horrors, and slasher theatrics. (There’s also a gonzo sequence involving a bore which puts to shame a similar section from last year’s The Strangers: Chapter 2.)
20th Century Studios
Yet the most memorable sections of the film are the quieter, least genre inflected ones. What makes Send Help so potent, and indeed so entertaining, is that it has a genuine satiric backbone that’s actually smart as opposed to buzzy but lazy. There are some supremely sharp beats in the screenplay by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, and the themes explored are undeniably subversive in a major studio picture. Raimi has never seemed more at home, blending the cartoonish and the squeamish to create something unexpectedly provocative.