In a recent Reddit AMA, someone asked Sam Raimi for his biggest gripe about modern superheroes. The director of the genre-defining early 2000s Spider-Man trilogy responded wryly: “That they don’t offer me more of them!” No offense to Raimi, who is one of the best directors of all time (in my humble opinion), but I’m extremely glad Marvel and DC aren’t blowing up his phone, trying to get him to helm more of their comic book movie franchises. Because Send Help, his latest theatrical horror-thriller, proves how desperately we need him to keep making films like this.
With Send Help, Raimi makes one clever adjustment to his usual penchant for heightened acting, zippy cinematography, and buckets-of-blood gore. Instead of the horror genre he mastered in his career-launching Evil Dead movies and 2009’s Drag Me to Hell, with Send Help, Raimi pivots to a Castaway-style survival thriller, filtered through his distinctly delirious lens.
Send Help stars Rachel McAdams as Linda Liddle, an overworked middle manager at a Fortune 500 company. Underappreciated by her boss and disliked by her coworkers, Linda spends her nights alone at home watching Survivor with her pet bird. To make matters worse, Linda’s frat-bro co-worker Donovan (Xavier Samuel) keeps stealing credit for her work. And when the boss’s son, Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien) takes over the business, he deprives Linda of the promotion his dad promised her, and elevates his former frat brother Donovan into a C-suite position.
Raimi cranks the degrading nature of office politics up to extremes. Donovan becomes a scheming, mustache-twirling villain with Gordon Gekko-inspired black suspenders (just without the mustache). An early scene where Linda makes a play for her promised raise without realizing she has a bit of tuna salad embarrassingly smeared on her face is sheer torture, as the camera zooms in on flecks of fish and mayonnaise in excruciating slow motion. It’s the kind of thing you’d never see in a modern superhero movie, but exactly what you’d expect from Raimi.
Raimi lingers over these stomach-churning moments of workplace banality, but the movie takes a sharp turn before too long. Bradley invites Linda along on a business trip to Bangkok, but when their corporate jet crashes somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, only the two of them survive. Raimi films the crash like a Final Destination opening set piece, relishing in the gory violence as Donovan and a few other disposable bros get flung from the plane and torn to pieces in mid-air. Bliss.
When Linda and Bradley are stranded on a desert island, her Survivor-honed instincts instantly kick in. She zealously rises to the challenge: building a shelter, gathering food, starting a fire, and nursing a wounded Bradley back to full health. The shifting power dynamics are immediately obvious to Linda, but her boss refuses to see them, which gives Send Help an eat-the-rich vibe that often borders on actual violence as the two protagonists continuously push each other’s buttons.
There’s also plenty of goopy, gory Raimi-style violence, with the wild landscape filling in for Evil Dead’s bile-spewing Deadites. One scene early on in which Linda hunts down a wild boar features so much blood, it almost defies reason. In another sequence, a desperate, starved Bradley eats a much less appetizing creature, and the camera lingers gleefully on each wretched bite. Without going into too much detail, there’s also a castration scene that will have audiences squirming. It’s the kind of thing James Gunn used to delight in at the start of his career in movies like Slither, long before he directed the Guardians of the Galaxy movies for Marvel and then took over the DC Universe.
Movies like Send Help, featuring Hollywood stars, visionary direction, and a legitimate theatrical release, are increasingly rare these days. Most horror flicks are made on a much smaller budget, and a lot of them get dumped on streaming, where they disappear into a vortex of never-ending content. Raimi is one of the few directors out there capable of making a film like this on his own terms, and we desperately need more of them.
All that said, I’ll watch whatever Raimi makes next. While his last superhero flick, Doctor Strange In the Multiverse of Madness, was far from perfect, you could still see his distinct style and vision fighting its way through the layers of Marvel Studios house style and shared-universe synergy. And there’s no denying that Raimi’s work on Spider-Man is not only brilliant, but defined the specific balance of action comedy and heart that later came to define the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and appears to be bleeding over into the DC Universe under Gunn’s new leadership.
If the director’s next project winds up being a Batman movie, which Raimi seems to be angling for in recent interviews, I’m sure he’ll do a great job bringing his campy sensibilities to an increasingly grimdark Dark Knight. But I’d much rather see another film in the vein of Send Help or Drag Me to Hell in a few years’ time, rather than having to wait a decade or more as Raimi plays another round of “One for them, one for me” with Hollywood. (Thankfully, the filmmaker has done a noble job of producing films on behalf of a new generation of horror directors, ensuring his legacy will last even longer than his personal run in Hollywood.)
The solution to Raimi’s desire to make more superhero movies might be a best-of-both-worlds situation. In a new interview with Movieweb, the director revealed that he’s currently working on a sequel to Darkman, his 1990 original superhero horror flick starring Liam Neeson in the title role. It doesn’t sound like he plans to direct the film himself, but maybe that will change as the project develops. And if Raimi can make a superhero movie on his own terms, with his own distinct style, then we all win.
