Sam Raimi’s first horror movie since 2009’s Drag Me to Hell happily fulfils its goop quota. Stars Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien find themselves, at various points, drenched in vomit, burst eyeball, bug innards, fish innards, and, of course, several power showers’ worth of splattered blood.
Send Help is another “eat the rich” parable, in which nepo baby CEO Bradley Preston (O’Brien) and Linda Liddle (McAdams), the employee he cruelly passed over for promotion, end up as castaways on the same Thai beach. Yet it’s been told with enough wit and viscera to outpace many of its competitors.
Granted, Raimi’s effectiveness as a filmmaker has been blunted by his over-reliance on digital gore effects. It’s a fairly damning indictment of how little Hollywood invests in its VFX artists, in both money and time, that so many shots here look worse than they did in Drag to Me to Hell (its infamous possessed goat has aged surprisingly well). Cheap CGI will never exude the same charm and ingenuity as cheap practical effects, and Raimi’s digital work will always pale in comparison to the exquisitely DIY shocks of his The Evil Dead (1981).
That said, the bitter aftertaste of green screen can at least be washed down here by the way Raimi’s camera still moves, like a mischievous sprite darting from rancid spectacle to rancid spectacle, or by how ferociously the verbal (and, at times, literal) knife fight is played out by Send Help’s two leads.
A Raimi horror is, by nature, mean-spirited (there’s so much more biting in this film than you’d normally expect). But while Drag Me to Hell bestowed endless infernal horrors on Alison Lohman’s otherwise sweet-natured office underling in retaliation for a single moral violation, Send Help plays a slippier, more compelling game with its protagonist. McAdams, in turn, delivers broad comedic strokes with such forceful humanity that she’s able to play her own tricks on the audience’s sympathies. She can screw up her face in a way that makes you start to fear that the entire thing might explode.
At first, you assume the actor is far too innately glamorous to play the “office weirdo”, the pock mark on Bradley’s corporate luxe life, with lipstick on her teeth, grease in her hair, and a glob of uneaten tuna mayo at the corner of her mouth. But there’s a point to be made somewhere in Damian Shannon and Mark Swift’s script: that beauty and power are not absolute, but dictated entirely by their environment. And the moment that Linda, a diehard fan of the reality series Survivor, discovers that she and Bradley are crash survivors stuck on a remote island, she undergoes her own “girl takes her glasses off” transformation, and McAdams the Hollywood star emerges.
See, we’re on Linda’s turf now. As she cheerily informs Bradley, “Welcome to my office” – a place where designer loafers and patriarchal condescension have no currency. Send Help here benefits from Raimi’s trademark ruthlessness, because it allows Linda (and, in turn, McAdams) to test both her sanity and our loyalty to the underdog, while O’Brien offers us enough genuine depth to force us, at times, to question Bradley’s inhumanity.
And when it all ends up tethered to the reminder that “no help is coming so you better start saving yourself”, Send Help becomes the best of both worlds: indulgent Raimi splatter fuelled by a satisfying touch of righteous rage.
Dir: Sam Raimi. Starring: Rachel McAdams, Dylan O’Brien, Edyll Ismail, Dennis Haysbert, Xavier Samuel, Chris Pang. Cert 15, 113 minutes.
‘Send Help’ is in cinemas from 30 January
