07/02/26

Cineworld, Edinburgh

After a somewhat muddled attempt to helm a Marvel film (2022’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness), Sam Raimi heads back into the kind of territory that’s a better fit for his directorial skills. If Send Help initially seems like an odd choice of vehicle, it nonetheless features the kind of perfectly-judged horror tropes that he’s founded his reputation on. And if it’s vaguely reminiscent of JM Barrie’s 1902 play, The Admirable Crichton – with the gender roles reversed – well, that may just be coincidental.

Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) has worked for years as a strategist for an American financial institution and has become the right-hand woman of the company’s CEO. She’s confidently expecting a hard-earned promotion when his son, Bradley (Dylan O’Brien), takes over the business, but it’s clear from the outset that the smug new boss has a low opinion of Linda with her sensible shoes and her tuna salad sandwiches. He informs her that the role of Vice President will go to his bestie, Donovan (Xavier Samuel), who plays golf with him and knows not to take things too seriously. The fact that Don has even less business acumen than Bradley seems not to bother the latter one jot.

But Bradley is sensible enough to keep Linda on the team for an important trip to Thailand, where he fully expects her to use her skills to finalise the company’s upcoming merger with their Eastern counterparts. On the flight over, Donovan chances on an old audition tape that Linda has made for the survival reality show that she watches in her leisure time. He gleefully shows it to the others. The all-male team take great delight in mocking her ambitions… and then the plane is hit by a sudden storm and suddenly, nobody’s laughing any more.

Come morning, Linda and Bradley are the sole survivors of the crash, stranded on an apparently uninhabited island. Bradley has suffered a leg injury. And the tables are beginning to turn…

Raimi has always had a knack of leavening his horror tropes with well-timed gags and that’s a quality that’s very much to the fore here. The screening I attend is punctuated by gales of laughter and gasps of horror in pretty much equal measure. Okay, so a late stage ‘revelation’ may not be quite the surprise that screenwriters Damon Shannon and Mark Swift were presumably aiming for, but there are nonetheless plenty of other unexpected twists and turns in the narrative that I really don’t see coming.

Both McAdams and O’Brien supply impressively nuanced performances (the film is essentially a two-hander) and, whenever I start to warm to one or the other of them, something happens to push me back in the opposite direction. But the overarching message about toxic masculinity comes through loud and clear and, no matter how devious Linda Liddle becomes, I can’t help rooting for her – even when she’s puking in the face of the person she’s attempting to deliver the kiss of life to.

Raimi aficionados will need to keep a very sharp eye out for the inevitable Bruce Campbell cameo – blink and you’ll surely miss it – but it is there.

Send Help is fast, frenetic and perfectly paced. It’s good to have the veteran director back in the driving seat with his foot on the accelerator.

4.4 stars

Philip Caveney