Rarely has an onscreen “Directed By” credit felt less necessary than Sam Raimi’s on Send Help. Obviously Raimi directed this thing; his fingerprints are all over every image; the extreme close-ups and gliding POV shots, the cartoonishly gloppy violence, the cheerfully sadistic sense of humor. No one else could have directed this movie — at least like this.
In many ways, Send Help is the spiritual sequel to Drag Me to Hell that Raimi fans (this one included) have been waiting for since 2009. Like its predecessor, Send Help is a small-scale moral fable about how quickly the dog-eat-dog world of capitalism can escalate into a full-blown horror. Both movies even share an inciting incident: A fight over a coveted job promotion, which frumpy Linda Little (Rachel McAdams) was promised by her company’s founder.
Unfortunately for Ms. Liddle (pronounced like little for maximum thematic resonance), said founder died before he could make good on his vow. And when the founder’s casually cruel son Bradley (Dylan O’Brien) takes over the company, he sees no reason to honor his father’s wishes. Bradley immediately hands Linda’s vice president position to one of his old fraternity brothers. Then he pours salt in the wound by openly mocking Linda’s disheveled appearance and “noxious” tuna breath.
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She may not be “executive material,” as Bradley puts it, but Linda is also a stalwart member of the company’s “Strategy and Planning” department, and thus too valuable to completely discard. So he drags her not to hell but on a business trip in Thailand, where the company will finalize an important merger. Or at least they’re supposed to finalize an important merger in Thailand; Bradley’s private plane encounters awful weather over the Pacific Ocean, and after a harrowing crash sequence, Bradley and Linda wash up on a deserted island as the only survivors.
Although Bradley tries to keep bossing Linda around, his leg gets badly injured in the crash — and even if it hadn’t been, he’s a nepo baby who possesses no practical skills and contributes almost nothing to their efforts to hold out long enough for a rescue. Linda, on the other hand, is not only a clever strategic planner, she’s a Survivor super fan, one so obsessed with the long-running reality show she’s filled her dumpy apartment with books about survival tips. A lifetime trapped on an empty beach with Linda might be Bradley’s nightmare; for Linda, it’s something close to a dream come true. Now she holds all the authority, and she’s quite happy to exploit it just as viciously as Bradley did back in civilization.
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With that, the stage is set for a sublime battle of the wills, one that Raimi tears into with the unbridled zeal of a man who just walked into an Old Country Buffet after two years living off bugs and mangos in a forsaken jungle hell. Send Help is Raimi’s first film without any supernatural or superhuman elements since 1999’s For Love of the Game, but he does not let his relatively grounded premise (written by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift) restrict any of his signature camera tricks and visual tropes. There are geysers of gore. There are sudden jump scares. There are magnificently dark jokes built around the constantly shifting power dynamics between the two leads as they attempt to outmaneuver one another for control of their few precious resources.
It must be noted here that Rachel McAdams is perhaps a little miscast as Linda. The woman who played the glamorous Queen Bee of the Plastics in Mean Girls is not the obvious choice for a dowdy office drone. There’s a slight She’s All That vibe to McAdams’ drab cardigan sweaters and frizzy hair in the movie’s early scenes, and it’s not at all surprising when she begins to grow more beautiful amidst the harsh conditions on the isolated island (Apparently waterfalls do amazing things for split ends.)
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That said, McAdams embraces Linda’s schemes and tactics with such gleeful gusto that it’s easy to understand why Raimi hired her despite her physical mismatch for the character. To play a proper Raimi protagonist, an actor must possess zero vanity; so much of his moves revolve around their ostensible heroes looking silly, failing, screwing up, falling down, making morally dubious decisions, getting covered with all manner of viscous liquids. McAdams seems to relish each and every one of those moments.
And O’Brien is flat-out great as her adversary, courting the audience’s disdain with an endless array of obnoxious rich-kid smirks and self-satisfied chuckles. Frankly, Bradley sucks, and viewers initially delight in Linda’s opportunity to turn the tables on him. But then Linda begins treating Bradley just as badly as he treated her, and O’Brien manages to pull off the trick of making us hate his character and feel sorry for him all at once. No easy feat.
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Like Bradley’s jet, Send Help comes in for a rough landing. Its twisted exploration of interpersonal ethics recalls an episode of The Twilight Zone — and Twilight Zones tend to operate best as short stories. (There’s a reason no one likes the one season of the series where they doubled the episode length from 30 to 60 minutes.) As Bradley and Linda wait for someone to find their little island, their conflict starts to sag a little. At least one plot development is pretty obviously telegraphed if you’re paying attention.
Still, the big finale redeems the middle section’s rocky patches with a very satisfying, very Raimi-esque conclusion. In the years since Drag Me to Hell, Raimi has directed just two films, Oz the Great and Powerful and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, projects that demonstrated his deft hand with big-budget spectacle, but provided less room for his quirky personality and his love of gross-out gags that are terrifying and hilarious all at once. For those of us who’ve been hoping for the old school Raimi to reemerge, help has finally arrived.
Additional Thoughts:
-Cheeky prankster that he is, Raimi even tossed in a few Evil Dead and Spider-Man Easter eggs for the sickos.
-Can we just pause for a moment and appreciate the fact that it’s 2026 and Sam Raimi just made an original R-rated horror movie? Not a remake, not a sequel, not based on a board game or a breakfast cereal mascot. The movies are back, baby!
RATING: 8/10
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