Send Help: Sam Raimi never misses with his amused cruelty, but he could have dared even more

Four years after the Marvel endeavors of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Sam Raimi returns to cinema with a project much closer to the dimension and genres that have marked much of his career: while Send Help is not strictly a horror film, it certainly has much in common with a Drag Me to Hell, though it prefers to express its violence and gore in a comedic-grotesque key, without truly frightening.

What could be more grotesque and disturbing than the world of white-collar workers? Perhaps a person who moves within it without truly understanding its codes, tolerated for their undeniable qualities and spirit of sacrifice but openly despised for their inability to mold their personality to truly belong to this environment. Rachel McAdams is a perfect Raimi protagonist because she is effectively dissonant: she ignores the office dress code and generally appears unkempt in appearance and lunch break etiquette. She is not an adorable klutz nor a tragically friendless person: she is the kind of character that leaves you with the suspicion that, in real life, you might not be too pleased to have as a desk mate in the office.

Which is essentially perfect, because Send Help works heavily on the underlying ambiguity of Linda Liddle: she is the protagonist of the story, she is a woman whose merits are at best unrecognized and at worst used against her…but is she the heroine or the antagonist, ultimately? Even her terrible boss could and perhaps would like to be an equally ambiguous character. Dylan O’Brien is the perfectly coiffed, clean-cut son of the company president he replaced, determined to acknowledge nothing to Linda, not even for the purpose of exploiting her as a "beast of burden." After a plane crash and a crash landing on a remote island in the Thai Sea, he is forced to revise his estimates: Linda's incredible competence and dedication also apply in a survival context like the one they are experiencing. She knows how to build shelter, find food and water, elevate the quality of life to make it more than decent; pleasant. He, on the other hand, suffers the loss of a "civilized" and urban framework in which his superiority in terms of power and prestige is immediately visible.

Rachel McAdams and Dylan O'Brien are the splendid duo of terrible protagonists in Send Help

A war of position predictably begins between the two: Bradley struggles to truly accept being in a position of need and shows very little survival instinct, while Linda is a born strategist, always ready to give him a second chance. In different ways, the island ends up revealing their true nature again and again, which social constructs have mitigated, lulled. It soon becomes clear to the viewer that the only incontrovertible truth is that the two are completely incompatible, because neither is willing to yield and admit they are wrong. Bradley, like Linda in the office, is blind to the unwritten rules of the place he finds himself in, to the position of weakness and submission that falls to him. His being male, rich, white, bourgeois, and educated in the best schools makes it practically impossible for him to convince himself, even for brief moments, that Linda is superior to him in their current context.

A reinterpretation of Misery, where the male character is driven by almost suicidal impulses, while the female character appears more open to redemption than her predecessor: Send Help is a thriller with gore touches (the fight with the wild boar, the vomit scene) in which not only Raimi's hand, but also his authentic enjoyment, is clearly perceptible. What makes the difference is above all Rachel McAdams, who once again demonstrates an enviable range: not only because she is among the very few actresses of her generation still able to move her forehead and facial features (it's quite a shock to realize, watching her, how accustomed we are to the opposite), but because few performers with her pedigree would lend themselves with as much conviction and talent to being "uglified" and ridiculed to say what this film wants to say. Among other things, with an evident (and amusing) difficulty in masking the natural attractiveness of the former Regina George. Dylan O'Brien also does his part, proving to be an excellent foil to McAdams and demonstrating how much he has matured since the days of Teen Wolf and The Maze Runner.

Send Help, unfortunately, settles for being entertaining and pleasant

Send Help is damn entertaining, albeit made a bit predictable by how it treads a path opened by Ruben Östlund with Triangle of Sadness and traversed by M. Night Shyamalan in Old. Two aspects work against it, which do not detract from the enjoyability of the film. Indeed, certain transitions, certain editing choices, and clever directorial turns immediately reveal the mastery and competence of the director. The first limitation of Send Help is its overall mediocre craftsmanship, in the sense that a film made with limited means today (i.e., shot digitally, with a lot of green screen, many somewhat crude visual effects, and anonymous cinematography) is infinitely uglier than the not-so-good, low-budget films of the past. Raimi worked for years in that range of low-to-medium budget genre cinema, producing commendable works. Moreover, even today, independent films or those with limited budgets (I'm thinking of A24 horrors or a certain segment of Blumhouse's production) can be pleasant when they want to be: Send Help, however, visually isn't that far from certain platform filler titles.

Unfortunately, this settling also reflects on its story, somewhat spoiled by a very rushed third act, which makes a strong choice in the ending (which sounds very 2015, let's say) but which doesn't seem to be the direct and logical consequence of what was seen before, but rather a dramatic conclusion. Inside Send Help, in theory, there's a very interesting discussion about the world of work and how it creates monsters, or perhaps just reveals them under the right conditions. Not only horrible bosses, but also people incapable of respecting themselves, finding in work the only possible recognition. Yet it's all sketched out, sometimes caricatural but never too specific: Linda could be an office colleague from American Psycho or Industry, given how vague the film's premises are about the company she works for. Similarly, it creates a past for the characters where there seem to be answers on both sides, but everything remains ambiguous and nuanced. The impression, however, is that this is not an ambiguity truly pursued, but rather the result of the desire to delve just enough to get to the confrontation, the splatter, the fighting.