New Sam Raimi films are few and far between these days, but when one appears, the debate as to whether he’s an inherently mean-spirited director invariably rears its head. His last pure horror movie, 2009’s Drag Me to Hell, is often deployed as the smoking gun for this argument, even though its protagonist represents everything audience members should root against: a loan manager desperate for a promotion who wills evil into her life after making an elderly woman homeless. Released in the wake of the 2008 financial crash, it was a characteristically goofy and gross ghost story that managed to meet its moment, slowly joining the ranks of Raimi’s best-regarded films in subsequent years, where it remained stubbornly topical. Send Help is being heavily trumpeted as Raimi’s first horror effort since, but is far more tantalizing when viewed as a return to that nihilistic strain of corporate satire where anybody who wants to climb the ladder is mercilessly punished for their shameless capitalist aspirations.
However, what Drag Me to Hell had that Send Help doesn’t was a screenplay penned by the horror maestro himself, and the script from Mark Swift and Damian Shannon—previously of Freddy Vs Jason and the Dwayne Johnson Baywatch movie—lacks a similar satirical focus, never quite sure who deserves to be the subject of its most deserved ire. Raimi has seemingly been brought aboard to polish up a screenplay still a few drafts away from successfully taking its targets down to size, and after a promising first act, it proves to be as lost at sea as its two characters, similarly struggling to find a palatable way to continue their journey out of there. It’s neither as funny as it needs to be nor as gross and gory as you’d hope Raimi’s first R-rated feature in more than two decades would prove, while still clearly salvaged by a talented filmmaker and two exceptional performers doing their best to elevate one-note, thinly sketched material.
Rachel McAdams is at her best when playing a put-upon everywoman, and the rare glimmer of a satirical pulse comes from the first act, where Raimi frames her character Linda Liddle as the monster her co-workers and new boss see her as, lingering on a facial blemish in extreme close-up or a dollop of tuna salad sandwich stuck at the side of her mouth. Promised a promotion by the recently departed CEO––depicted in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it background portrait by Raimi regular Bruce Campbell––her dreams of climbing the corporate ladder are trampled over when his dickhead son Bradley (Dylan O’Brien) takes over, choosing to hire one of his college frat bros for the high-flying VP position instead. The revenge she is inevitably going to get over him and an entire workforce who treat her as a laughing stock should be straightforwardly sweet, but it soon becomes clear the screenwriters hold both in equal contempt.
Told to prove herself by Bradley, Linda is invited to fly with them to Thailand for a corporate-merger meeting––on the way, the boorish men discover her Survivor audition tape and put the final nail in the coffin that they’d ever take her seriously. Then their plane crashes, everybody but Bradley and Linda dies, and the two are washed up on a remote island with nothing but the skills she’s learned from watching endless seasons of the hit show to keep them alive. It should be a satisfying turning of tables: the millennial boss getting his comeuppance for treating an older, more accomplished woman badly, relying on her for survival when they have no idea if help is on the way. But the ways Swift and Shannon’s screenplay twists the knife from there—constantly changing the dynamics to try gauging audience sympathy for both sides—is repeatedly clumsy, becoming the mean-spirited romp Drag Me to Hell’s detractors claimed it was. This is purely from their inability to add wider dimensionality to either character, making Linda and Bradley’s behavior increasingly puzzling as it draws into an unsatisfying third act built around ever-shifting allegiances.
McAdams and O’Brien both manage to make this more entertaining and less infuriating than it sounds, selling both the broad rivalry dynamic and the more introspective moments in ways that likely don’t land on paper. The one thing neither is able to do, however, is make the material particularly funny; they render their familiar comic archetypes lived-in and more specific than we’re accustomed to, but the laughs remain illusory, and this might be the biggest issue. It has both the structural bones of a great black comedy and the committed performances to make it work, but lacks anything approaching a gag to back it up, with only overplayed character quirks (like the Survivor obsession) offering levity. Without the jokes or a coherent satirical aim, it’s no surprise Send Help feels mean-spirited, its narrative bending over backwards in later stages to prove Linda as heartless as her nemesis in the corner office. A tossed-off epilogue feels like the result of test-screening feedback to clarify that this was parodying careerism—the drama does so too clumsily to scan as such. It never feels like the movie is daring us to question our allegiance to Linda so much as it seems confused as to who she is, failing to scratch beneath the surface to the point her later behavior only functions as a series of twists rather than logical developments from her frame of mind.
As for what Raimi brings to the table: there is far less of a reliance on the same practical effects that made his prior horror work so memorably disgusting. Yes, there are pints of fake blood squirted out at both leads, but most obstacles they face are distracting CGI monstrosities, and the two attempts at jump scares––one a left-field, late-in-the-game attempt at supernatural suspense––feel like jarring inclusions simply so the marketing can label Send Help horror without stretching that definition too far. He’s working with material that doesn’t suit his strengths in horror or comedy, and the script’s glimmers of both aren’t substantial enough for him to elevate them into something memorable. That he’s made this script watchable is the big success, and it still winds up less interesting than when he pulled off the Herculean feat of making late-period MCU feel exciting for two hours with his Doctor Strange sequel. That film’s glimmers of his old trademarks showed there’s still a great late-period horror in Raimi––this falls far short of the mark.
Send Help opens in theaters on Friday, January 30.