Movie Review: "Send Help" Finds Sam Raimi Returning to His Darkly Funny and Wicked Roots
The newest film from Sam Raimi, 20th Century Studios' Send Help is a wonderfully twisted and engaging thriller that manages to take the audience on quite the wild journey.
Rachel McAdams stars as Linda Liddle, a highly skilled employee at the big corporation she works for, who also happens to be an awkward and frequently off-putting mess when it comes to social dynamics. Her company's CEO valued her work enough to still want to promote her to VP, but when he passes away and his son, the vapid and arrogant Bradley Preston (Dylan O'Brien), takes over, he wants little to do with Linda and immediately places his college fraternity brother into the position she was promised.
But besides the amazing math skills that allow her to excel at her job, Linda has one other area of expertise: Outdoor survival skills. She's something of an obsessive on the latter subject in terms of hobbies, and desperately wants to go on her favorite show, Survivor. All of which means she is uniquely prepared when she and Bradley are the only survivors when their corporate jet crashes, washing them up on the shore of an uninhabited island. And now the injured Bradley is at the mercy of someone he's treated with nothing but ridicule and contempt, even as she's nursing him back to health.
Sam Raimi has had huge mainstream success with movies like the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man trilogy and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, but his roots lie with his cult classic comedy-horror Evil Dead films. Of course you can absolutely see those roots pop up from time to time in much of his other work, including his superhero projects, and Multiverse of Madness especially had plenty to offer in this regard, given it culminates with its hero inhabiting a reanimated corpse to save the day.
Still, Send Help is the first time since 2009's Drag Me to Hell that Raimi's directed a movie completely leaning into his most macabrely clever and funny tendencies. Though not quite a full horror movie -- "thriller" would probably be more accurate, given the plotline -- Raimi clearly relishes getting to operate in his classic wheelhouse and embrace a lot of his favorite elements. This includes putting his lead actors through the physical wringer, with McAdams and O'Brien clearly having gone through the Raimi gauntlet on set, which includes his tradition of absolutely drenching his characters in liquids, including water, blood and, yep, vomit.
Obviously this ain't for everyone, but what always makes Raimi so fun and often more accessible than other directors who go big with gross outs is that he leans into all of this with such an overtly witty touch. As with the likes of Evil Dead II or Drag Me to Hell, the purposeful excess of it all that often makes it so funny - When Linda goes hunting for a boar, things go to huge extremes in terms of how the situation gets out of hand and how Linda (and the boar) react to this primal showdown.
Screenwriting duo Damian Shannon & Mark Swift (Freddy vs. Jason and 2009's Friday the 13th) make for a great partnership with Raimi, crafting a story that operates at just the right level for his sensibilities. The movie has a lot of curveballs as it continues, and Shannon & Swift deftly introduce these new elements in fun and surprising ways. And they make sure that the film's two lead characters are both understandable as people, even when operating at such extreme levels. The dynamic between Linda and Bradley evolves a lot throughout the movie and there's an excitement in constantly trying to figure out how much of it can be taken at face value or not given their underlying tensions.
Send Help is truly a two-hander. Though we get glimpses at a few other folks, like Bradley's fiancé, Zuri (Edyll Ismail), the vast majority of the movie only features Linda and Bradley. Fortunately, Raimi has cast two leads who are more than up to holding the screen so this long, starting with his reunion with Multiverse of Madness' Rachel McAdams. The always fantastic McAdams is able to show so many variations of Linda though Send Help. She is able to play the hugely dorky, embarassing side of the character in a way that is both humorous and empathetic. And then she needs to show the character begin to thrive out in the wild, and how Linda finally feels comfortable in a way that's always eluded her. In the midst of all this, there is a scene where she delivers a monologue about her past that is one of the movie's only fully serious scenes and she completely nails it, expertly taking the audience on this tonal shift with her. Linda is far from an idealized heroine, making some rather intense decisions along the way, but McAdams and Raimi make sure we can still understand what makes her tick, start to finish.
O'Brien meanwhile embraces the walking, talking smarm and casual nastiness that is Bradley. That doesn't mean Bradley is one-note though, and O'Brien is able to take the character on his own topsy-turvy path. Swift and Shannon's script includes some interesting perspective shifts, and there are times where we might not be rooting for Bradley in the traditional sense, but we can at least understand his own fears about the situation he's trapped in, especially as Linda expresses that she isn't exactly psyched about the idea of a rescue team finding them.
Oh, and kudos to O'Brien for the ride he takes Bradley (and the audience) through in a scene where the starving Bradley impulsively decides to eat... something he regrets eating. O'Brien has some truly hysterical reactions, not to mention a perfectly annoying laugh for his character, throughout the film.
The film also benefits from a great, moody Danny Elfman score that is very different from his usual style, in the same way he notably switched things up when scoring Raimi's A Simple Plan.
Filled with Raimi's trademark visual flair -- from amusingly tight shots of someone's eyes judgmentally watching someone else, to the camera careening through the woods like the unseen force in Evil Dead -- Send Help is a dark delight for those willing to go along for its R-rated ride. It takes a bigger than life situation that is easy to connect with, as far as the wish fulfillment of being a poorly treated employee now having the upper hand against their boss, and then continually escalates the specifics in very memorable ways.
Grade: Four out of five stars.
Send Help opens in theaters on January 30th.