After they crashland on a remote island, a psychopathic employee and her narcissistic boss must put their differences aside to survive.
Chaos that will make you laugh out loud! Blending comedy with thriller/horror is notoriously difficult. One misstep and the tone collapses into parody or self-serious absurdity. But this balancing act has long been part of director Sam Raimi’s cinematic DNA – The Evil Dead franchise, anyone? It’s practically his trademark. And while he hasn’t always landed the mixture perfectly, Send Help proves he still knows how to juggle dread and laughter in the same breath.
Writers Damian Shannon and Mark Swift provide Raimi with sturdy material: solid characters, surrealistic tribulations, clever temporary solutions – and then even bigger problems that render those solutions useless. The film thrives on escalation. Just when you think stability has been restored, it pulls the rug out again.
Linda (Rachel McAdams) is a volatile force of nature, shifting constantly from heroine to antiheroine to full-blown unhinged villain and back again. The speed of her emotional transitions becomes part of the film’s rhythm. McAdams handles these pivots with impressive control, allowing even her most extreme turns to feel believable within the heightened world Raimi constructs.
Opposite her, Bradley (Dylan O’Brien) is brilliantly insufferable – an obnoxious, narcissistic, entitled boss whose grating personality never softens – only pretentiously. O’Brien leans into the character’s worst qualities without hesitation. Watch the small details: the exaggerated open-mouthed laugh, the micro-expressions of smugness.
Tonally, as said in the beginning, Send Help feels tightly calibrated. The comedy never fully undercuts the horror, and the horror never suffocates the absurdity. Instead, they feed off one another, creating a surreal loop of tension and release that keeps you on the edge of your seat while sometimes making you laugh. There are quite a few highly unlikely or even impossible moments throughout the film, but surely you can turn a blind eye. Realism is most definitely not its endgame.
The film has drawn comparisons to Triangle of Sadness (2022) – an observation worth revisiting with a fresh eye – I need to watch it again. While the thematic parallels are obvious, the cinematic techniques and genre conventions remain open for debate. I’ll come back for that soon. What is certain is this: Send Help understands its own chaos. It commits. And in doing so, it delivers a sharp, entertaining horror/comedy that is arguably the best one we’ve seen in years.
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