Job Insecurity: SEND HELP

If the only thing exciting in Send Help is the filmmaking and the lead performance, well, oh boy, that’s enough. It’s an unsurprising bit of genre fluff—a little Lord of the Flies here, a little Triangle of Sadness there, a splash of Misery elsewhere—in which a plane crash leaves a frumpy office worker (Rachel McAdams) on a deserted island with her callow young boss (Dylan O’Brien). The situation leads to an expected role reversal as the boss is laid up with a sprained ankle and a total lack of survival skills. Meanwhile his employee is a survivalist with a vindictive streak. It’s all good, nasty fun as orchestrated by director Sam Raimi, who at long last gets to stretch his horror-comic talents again for a sustained exercise in tension. His glee for near-cartoonish reaction shots, swirling establishing shots, and punchy pushes and pans are a fine match for a movie which needs that kind of egging on. The performers are game, with McAdams a fine, slippery protagonist made astonishingly unglamorous at first, and steelier as the show goes on. O’Brien, for his part, transforms into a perfect weasel, weaponizing his good looks until he’s untrustworthy even when he’s playing at earnestness. The cat and mouse game is made up of traditional jungle beats, the kinds any boomer filmmaker would’ve imbibed with every local late show or weekend matinee: spears, rafts, vines, coconut cups, wild boar, cliffs off which to dangle. It has everything but the quicksand. And to each twist of the script’s knife, Raimi is willing to add gallons of fluids from arterial spray and vomit and snot. Even early office-set scenes have a zippy, mean-spirited satiric edge, and the later mind games and inevitable violence—from an off-screen slice leading to an eruption of bloody gobs, to a literally eye-gouging thumb under an eyelid—are jumps and jolts with a sick glee. It may not have the novelty of his Evil Dead or heft of Drag Me to Hell, two far superior comic horror efforts rocking and rolling with laughs and screams. But this new picture has a similar vivid, cynical spirit of a karmic comic book. Raimi knows how to pace horror and violence so satisfyingly like a comedy, literal sight gags and punch lines. It’s why his Spider-Man trilogy remains some of the only superhero movies to do justice to every bit of the phrase comic book movie. And it’s why even as slight a screenplay as Send Help comes jumping to life with invigorating style.