In the works of director Sam Raimi there is a not particularly friendly, but nevertheless cheerful look at the less subtle qualities of people who had to grow up under the conditions of the free market economy. This is particularly true for the smaller productions, apart from the blockbusters, which seem as if they were the core of this cinematic work. The characters are removed from the already unpleasant normal course, put into extreme situations and then dismantled. In a metaphorical sense or literally physically.
His latest film “Send Help” is a Robinsonade in which a career-obsessed but unfortunately hard-working and unperforming employee is unleashed on her CEO. Or vice versa, depending. Linda Liddle, note the name, is denied the promised promotion by her new boss Bradley. Bradley is a boss straight out of the #MeToo horror catalogue, dominant and invasive.
Rachel McAdams plays the subordinate, without make-up, in potato sack clothes and with a tuna fish sandwich on her mouth, as an intense embodied foreign shame. But also as – initially – a good soul. At the other end, Dylan O’Brien puts in a perfectly formed asshole performance as a bullying boss, whose recurring cliche (golf in the office) isn’t a problem. After all, this is a very dark comedy.
„Send Help“. Regie: Sam Raimi. Mit Rachel McAdams, Dylan O’Brien u.a. USA 2026, 113 Min.
On their flight together to visit their business partners in Bangkok, the mutually hating duo crashes and ends up stranded on a deserted island, and “Send Help” opens with the crash. another register. The destruction of the plane and its occupants (except for two) is staged as an over-the-top horror sequence and is in no way inferior to the legendary disasters in the first “Final Destination” films.
Ups and downs with abysses
The balance of power is reversed. Linda is a fan of survival series and knows how to build a shelter out of palm leaves, obtain water and catch fish. Bradley doesn’t know anything. In the alternation between cooperation and struggle between the disgusting boss and the not-so-sympathetic employee, the hierarchies keep shifting. Sometimes one dominates, then the other, and in this ups and downs more and more abysses become apparent.
The brilliant script by the previously unnoticed authors Mark Swift and Damian Shannon psychologically develops a surprisingly subtle, constantly shifting dynamic, the tension of which often discharges itself in very physical sequences.
Sam Raimi is one of the few directors who have made it from the edges of cinema to the center: from Splatter from the “Evil Dead” films made in the eighties to the “Spider-Man” trilogy released in the noughties and Marvel blockbusters like „Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness“ (2022).
The steep thesis that the ambitions, successes and hellish journeys of his outsider characters in “Drag Me to Hell” and especially in “Send Help” can be read as a self-reflective understanding about the conditions of one’s own artistic creation, at least it is obvious.
Feel like messing around
In „Send Help“ it always becomes very physical. Linda vomits on her boss, a wild boar slaughter and castration scene are staged as a splatterfest, and a ghostly apparition on the beach could have drifted straight from Raimi’s ‘Evil Dead’ films of the ’80s.
The excess that Raimi develops here with his congenial colleagues Bill Pope (camera) and Bob Murawski (editor), who have been sailing with him for almost four decades, even if only in moments and short sequences, is very noticeable stylistically in a darkly humorous comedy.
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But it’s not out of the ordinary. In addition to the desire to mess around with blood and extremities, Raimi has inherited an extremely grim view of humanity from the beginning of his career. The sardonic humor fuels the disgusting images and vice versa. Raimi takes his characters as they are and shows them in their submissive competence, vanity and career or simply money lust.
Poisonous Happy Ending
The heroic myth of social advancement through one’s own strength is destroyed along with the characters who follow it in Raimi’s stories. Anyone in films like “A Simple Plan“, „Drag Me to Hell“ and now “Send Help” If you try to make more of yourself and make big money, you end up bathed in vomit and/or blood.
“Send Help” is fun from the first to the last minute and doesn’t tip over into misanthropy. Simply because his radical negativity is extremely cheerful. Sam Raimi acts as a director whenever you let him, like Walter Benjamin’s destructive character, only as a comic author. And, according to Benjamin, he only knows one slogan: “Create space; only one activity: clear.”
At the end of “Send Help” there is nothing positive to replace the myth, but rather a happy ending that is poisoned in the sense that at this point you no longer like the character who finally gets what he always wanted. “His need for fresh air and free space is stronger than any hate,” writes Benjamin. Despite all their destructiveness, you always come out of Raimi’s darkly humorous films somehow relieved and able to take a deep breath.