Sam Raimi strands a mousy employee and her boss on an island and lets her chair the meeting. Rachel McAdams is superb and the gore is cheerfully vile; the script has fewer ideas than she does. Worth your evening if you can stomach it.
Linda Liddle works in strategy and planning at a company run by Bradley Preston, who barely registers that she exists. Then the company plane goes into the sea, and the two of them wash up on an island with nothing but what is in their pockets. She knows how to make fire and find water. He knows how to run a meeting. Send Help is Sam Raimi’s first out-and-out horror film since Drag Me to Hell, and it is nasty, funny and better acted than it had any need to be. It also has fewer ideas than it has litres of blood, and it runs out of the former first.
Rachel McAdams is the reason to see it. She plays Linda with her shoulders up, her hair scraped back and a habit of apologising before anyone has interrupted her, and she gets laughs from nothing more than the length of a pause. On the island she does not become a different woman. She simply stops apologising, and McAdams lets you watch the moment she notices that nobody can make her start again. Dylan O’Brien has the harder job, because Preston is the boss who thinks he is the good kind, and O’Brien plays him as a man whose confidence came with the job title and has now been withdrawn. He is at his funniest when he is most frightened, which is often.
Bill Pope, who shot The Matrix, gives the office the flat grey light of a place where nothing has happened for years, and then throws the island into hard white sun, so that every scrape shows and the blood goes black against the sand. Ian Gracie’s production design makes the shelter Linda builds out of wreckage into a small joke about competence: it has a place for everything, and Preston is not consulted on any of it. Anna Cahill’s costumes do the story’s work by degrees, Preston’s suit coming apart at the seams over the weeks while Linda’s cardigan, of all things, holds. Danny Elfman, who has scored for Raimi since Darkman, writes for the island as if it were a fairground, brass and shrieks and sudden silences, and Bob Murawski, who has cut Raimi’s films since Army of Darkness, cuts on the shriek.
The set piece everyone will talk about involves a boar, and it is the film in miniature. We laughed, loudly, and then felt slightly ashamed of ourselves, because what the scene is actually showing us is a woman finding out that she enjoys this, and Raimi times the gag so the shame arrives a beat after the laugh. That has always been his gift. The camera whips round, something wet hits something hard, and you are grinning before you have decided whether you should be.
The blood is the weak point, which in a Raimi film is a strange thing to write. Too much of it is digital and looks it, splashes that sit on the image instead of soaking into it, and in a film this committed to being disgusting that matters. The bigger trouble is the script. Damian Shannon and Mark Swift have a good premise and a thin argument. The satire says that bosses are awful and asks whether we agree, and having established that we do, it says it again. Somewhere in the second half the film takes a turn we will not describe, and it is the point at which it backs away from the uncomfortable thing it has set up and reaches for a chase instead. By then we had stopped being surprised.
Raimi has done this better. Drag Me to Hell had the same glee and kept hold of its story to the end. But most films sold as horror-comedy manage one half of the description, and this one manages both. At 113 minutes it could lose ten without anyone noticing which ten.
See it with somebody who has a manager, and watch which of you laughs first.
