By MICHAEL GINGOLD
Starring Rachel McAdams, Dylan O’Brien and Edyll Ismail
Directed by Sam Raimi
Written by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift
20th Century Studios
The first 15 minutes or so of SEND HELP play—intentionally—like they’re part of one of those romantic comedies about an ugly duckling who becomes a swan. And that’s kinda sorta what the rest of SEND HELP resembles, if you consider that swans can pivot to viciousness when they feel threatened.
Just as Sam Raimi jumped back into getting his hands bloody with DRAG ME TO HELL after shepherding the first SPIDER-MAN feature trilogy, he has once again pivoted from superheroics (DOCTOR STRANGE IN THE MULTIVERSE OF MADNESS) to return to his gruesomely black-comic roots. (It’s a bit startling to realize that this is only his third feature as director since HELL 17 years ago.) And as opposed to pushing the boundaries of PG-13 with HELL, SEND HELP finds him in full-bore R-rated mode.
That said, it’s overall more of a black comedy than a horror film, though you might see it as the latter if you were a dudebro like Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien). Having taken over for his recently departed father as boss of Preston Strategic Solutions, one of Bradley’s first acts is to deny employee Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) a promotion his dad had promised her. Linda is supercompetent at her job, but she’s socially awkward, needy, lacking fashion sense and, at a crucial moment, doesn’t realize a bit of tuna salad is clinging to the corner of her mouth.
Bradley and his colleagues, including former frat brother Donovan (THE LOVED ONES’ Xavier Samuel), treat Linda with disdain to her face and worse behind her back, and it feels like he only invites her along on a corporate trip to Thailand so they’ll have more opportunities to mock her. But it’s on that flight that Raimi and scripters Damian Shannon and Mark Swift really get cooking. Just as the boys are guffawing over Linda’s recently discovered audition tape for SURVIVOR, their small jet suffers a catastrophic midair accident, in which Raimi, for the first of many times in SEND HELP, combines a horrific situation with darkly amusing, eccentric details. That video proves prescient after Linda and Bradley are the only ones left alive after the crash, washed up on the shore of a possibly uncharted tropical island.
McAdams, who previously endured airborne stress in Wes Craven’s RED EYE, hits all the right notes in SEND HELP’s first act to get us on Linda’s side, while also making her enough of an awkward mouse that her subsequent transformation fully lands. With Bradley incapacitated by a leg injury (given some juicy close-ups, of course) and immediate rescue not forthcoming, Linda has the chance to put those survival skills into practice. Needless to say, Bradley doesn’t take well to Linda now being in charge, and O’Brien does a great job enacting this slimeball you love to hate, who you get the feeling wouldn’t like the idea of any woman being the boss.
As time goes on, Bradley starts to appreciate Linda’s efforts to keep them both alive—or does he? One of the many entertaining things about SEND HELP is the way it keeps you off balance about what its two protagonists/antagonists are actually thinking, feeling and plotting. Linda, of course, is invested in keeping herself alive, but how concerned is she really about Bradley’s well-being? Does she know more about the situation than she’s telling? Has Bradley truly changed his point of view on his former underling, or is he just biding his time until he can reclaim the upper hand? You may think you know the answers, but you likely won’t know them all, and Raimi and the writers keep finding new ways to twist the story in unexpected and sometimes shocking directions.
Raimi laces this tense emotional rollercoaster with plenty of his trademark aggressive style, employing exaggerated close-ups and baroque visual/editing tricks, and taking every opportunity to play things to the nasty/icky hilt. The fact that we’re so invested with the two leads means that we squirm all the more when physical damage is inflicted on them, particularly one setpiece that had a preview audience very vocally reacting. The most go-for-broke scene involves Linda tussling with a wild boar, a visceral struggle that incites groans and gasps of laughter as it keeps going, and going. (It puts the similar porcine assault in THE STRANGERS—CHAPTER 2 to shame.)
Even as Raimi has proven himself in the upper strata of mass-appeal mega-moviemaking, it’s gratifying to see him back in smaller-scale, harder-core territory, with all the evident enthusiasm he brought to the initial EVIL DEAD films. Reuniting with ARMY OF DARKNESS cinematographer Bill Pope, he brings plenty of polish to the visuals, making the island look like a great place to get stranded if the company was better. Danny Elfman contributes a score that matches and enhances the zigzagging emotions beat for beat, and the makeup effects by Paul Katte and Nick Nicolaou are just as squeam-inducing as their work in TALK TO ME and BRING HER BACK. Oh, and a certain longtime acting collaborator of Raimi’s does make an appearance—but you’ll have to look fast for him.
