Filmmaker Sam Raimi has been there and done it all: from his early screwball comedies like Crimewave to his sophomore cult horror Evil Dead trilogy; from the star-studded western The Quick and the Dead to his time birthing the Sony Spidermans; from down to earth thrillers like A Simple Plan to the epic fantasy Oz the Great and Powerful.
But wait there’s more – the soon-to-be-reprised comic book-esque Darkman, his work on the chronically underrated The Hudsucker Proxy, his recent trip back into the Marvel Cinematic Universe with Dr Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and the madcap meld of slapstick comedy and extreme gross out horror that was Drag Me to Hell.
I’m not sure if you can tell… but I’m a fan.
Raimi is a storyteller who has always known how to push the limits of taste in his films, and in Send Help he once more takes the audience into the palm of his hand and keeps them there.
Rachel McAdams is perfectly cast as mousey, awkward Linda Liddle, the long-time manager of the Planning and Strategy department at a frat-bro-filled Fortune 500-type company. Through some narrative misadventure and some extreme Raimi stylings, she ends up marooned on a desert island with the new nepo-CEO and archetypal horrible boss Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien).
McAdams and O’Brien riff beautifully off each other, with the latter cleverly making sure McAdams takes centre stage.
Linda has become a survivalist expert by osmosis watching Survivor and consuming volumes of literature on the subject when not swigging wine and holding deep and meaningful conversations with her pet cockatoo Sweetie.
Her transformation from the competent but downtrodden office frump to abusive island girl boss is one that McAdams and Raimi navigate carefully, with even her most extreme proclivities excused in the name of sweet, sweet vengeance. Kind of…
The script from Damian Shannon and Mark Swift (who penned some Freddies, some Jasons, and some, um, Baywatch!) throws the net wide, with everything from The Blue Lagoon, Misery, Office Space, Castaway, Swept Away, War of the Roses, Lord of the Flies, I Spit on Your Grave and Triangle of Sadness – particularly that film’s incredible final act – thrown in the mix. Raimi, consummate professional that he is, juggles these sources and never lets things feel out of control, whilst simultaneously pulling the rug whenever you feel you might know where this weird and wonderful tale is going.
As with Raimi’s Evil Dead franchise, the tone that he strikes is slapstick, bringing a lightness to the powerplays and violence into which the film inevitably descends.
The Suva audience I saw this with seemed unsure what to make of it at first, but quickly found their bearings, and the theatre was soon filled with laughter as they realised this was a no-holds-barred, cartoonish exploration of what survival means when you enter a state of nature and find there are no creature comforts, and more importantly no systemic privileges of patriarchal, patrilinear capitalism.
Yass queens, this is indeed a tale of female empowerment and a satire on toxic work environments, and yet for all its subtext, it just feels like a whole lot of fun! So fasten your seatbelts, because it’s about to get bumpy!
