‘How valuable to the company am I now?‘
It’s been a long, old time since Sam Raimi, the creator of The Evil Dead franchise, returned to the world of horror cinema. Drag Me to Hell, his last jaunt into these dark waters, dropped in 2009. Since then, Raimi has directed his disastrous Wizard of Oz reboot Oz the Great and Powerful and worked as a Marvel gun-for-hire on Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, so fans have been waiting a long time for Raimi to unleash something that feels like it’s his. Well, if nothing else, there is absolutely no denying that Send Help is a Raimi project through and through…
We begin with an uncomfortable meeting between meek but hard-working corporate strategist Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) and her new nepo baby, finance bro boss, Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien). After being passed up for a promotion that was promised to her by the previous CEO (Bradley’s father), Linda reluctantly agrees to accompany Bradley on a corporate trip to Bangkok. When the plane crashes on a remote island, the power dynamic between Linda and Bradley shifts dramatically.
Anyone familiar with Raimi’s previous work will know what to expect here. Lots of camera tickery, gross out humour, buckets of gore… and yet, this thing never feels played out. While I prefer Drag Me to Hell overall, Send Help is just as effervescent and unhinged as that film was. Raimi has clearly lost none of his passion for filmmaking; it’s there in the gleeful use of vomit, snot and blood. It’s there in the fast pace and the suspenseful, enigmatic plotting. Unfortunately, for a director who was once so innovative with practical and in-camera effects, there is a reliance on CGI here, and, even worse, a lot of that CGI doesn’t look great. This is frustrating because McAdams and O’Brien are both excellent. They both dive in headfirst, with McAdams in particular showing us something that we haven’t seen from her before. This is a surprisingly layered and nuanced performance in a film that is essentially presented as a good time at the movies and nothing more. There is some stuff in there about the horrors of corporate working and how impossible it is to advance without the right contacts, but the writing team behind Freddy vs Jason (Damian Shannon and Mark Swift) are perhaps not the best people to tackle satire. That being said, biting social commentary is not what we’re here for. We’re here to watch two people suffer immensely and take comfort in the fact that it’s not happening to us. And by that metric, Send Help must be considered a success.
While it doesn’t come close to troubling Raimi’s best work, Send Help is still an occasionally thrilling and always entertaining horror fable that delivers more than it doesn’t. The fact that it has been both a critical and commercial success is heartening. Hopefully, we don’t have to wait another 17 years for Raimi to return to the land of horror.
