After a career filled with cult horror success and superhero movie blueprints, Sam Raimi can, arguably, do anything he wants.
It is no secret to readers of this site that we are big fans of Sam Raimi. He is one of my formative directors: thrilling me with Spider-Man (those first two films are better than The Lord of the Rings. Yes, I’m serious), disgusting me with the Evil Dead, and making me nearly wet myself seeing Drag Me to Hell in the cinema (I was young). If he makes a film I’m there on day one; except for Oz I felt compelled to give that a miss, and I was right to. Throughout his filmography, despite his mainstream chops, Raimi has been more adventurous than might first meet the eye (oh, no, not the eye! Ah!) – you can tell a Raimi film when you see it, even the distinct averageness of something like Multiverse of Madness. Now, he has stuck Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien on an island with only their wits to survive. If I were them, I would politely ask for a different director.
Send Help is a classic desert island movie set-up, with a standard relationship dynamic that gets flipped on its head by unexpected disaster. Rachel McAdams’ Linda, an overworked, underappreciated strategist for her company’s Planning and Strategy Department (oh, it comes up a lot), and her new boss, Bradley (O’Brien), the typical corporate bro who likes golf, hates Linda, and acts like a prince until the jet that they are both on crashes and Bradley and Linda are the only survivors. Linda, in a very Raimi touch of absurdity, is a fanatic for the American reality show Survivor. So much so that she has mentally and physically prepared herself for such a disaster, leaving Linda and Bradley’s hierarchy immediately switched. He is injured, and she has the skills to keep them both alive.
Unsurprisingly, Linda is not very gracious about this. The slightly sad, sort of pathetic woman we see at the start wastes no time in taking control. There is a definite vein of gender politics going on here, but Raimi only seems intermittently interested in it.. Instead, Send Help takes on a more class-centric story, reminiscent of the 1957 desert island film, Paradise Lagoon in which a very posh family get stranded along with their butler, where the butler, like Linda, is the only one with any practical skills. Except in Raimi’s version there is much more blood and vomit. Of course.
As much as Raimi’s bloody, pus-stained fingerprints are all over this, credit has to go to McAdams and O’Brien. McAdams clearly relishes ripping the layers off of Linda’s character and showing the monster within – sure, it’s hard not to feel sympathy at the start, but her slow rise into her best and worst selves are impossibly entertaining and a reminder of McAdams undeniable and enduring star power. I haven’t seen Dylan O’Brien in anything but the first few episodes of Teen Wolf (how was he cast as a sidekick?) but Send Help doesn’t work without him. He plays Bradley with an effortless pomposity pre-crash, and humanises him on the island without losing that manic need to get out of the damn place. He sinks to Linda’s level, but little does he know, she’s ready to take this sub-terra-firma.
Both actors are made for each other, elevating an old hat story with the help of a director who is as crazy as ever. With Send Help, Sam Raimi has proven that he can add his unique sensibility to any story and make it soar – or bleed.
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By Kevin Boyle
(header image via IMDB)
No But Listen 