The film, written by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift (remember Freddy vs Jason?), might seem on paper a social parable about work dynamics, gender differences, or toxic competition in corporate teams. And in part, it is. But Raimi is interested in something more universal and, in a certain sense, more cruel: power is always relative. Whoever is in charge in one situation can become immediately useless in another. The world is full of lions and lambs, but it's enough to change the scenario for the roles to reverse. Linda is a lamb in the office, but in the jungle, she becomes the predator. And Bradley, so sure of himself in his suit and tie, discovers himself suddenly fragile, dependent, lost.
But Send Help wouldn't be a Sam Raimi film if it limited itself to that. In fact, it's precisely when the situation becomes more desperate that his poetry emerges with force. The film gradually slides into the grotesque, in an escalation of violence, splatter, and situations bordering on the absurd, where drama and comedy end up merging into something that resembles an animated cartoon in flesh and blood. Exactly as it was in Drag Me to Hell, except that here there is no supernatural: horror arises entirely from the bodies, hunger, thirst, fear, and, above all, the despair of people.
Raimi then amuses himself openly by self-citing, transforming the film into a kind of sum of his imaginary. The protagonist is named Linda, like Ash's girlfriend in The Evil Dead 2. Bruce Campbell appears in his usual and delightful cameo, in the role of the (deceased) father of Bradley Preston: attention to the walls of his office. The pendant that Linda wears reminds us a lot of the one Ash gave to his Linda. In a dream sequence, a creature appears that clearly reminds us of the Kandarian demons, and it doesn't even lack the famous subjective shot that rushes between the trees. It's a cinematic game that never weighs down the film but enriches it, offering the passionate viewer a series of irresistible winks.
As for the cast, Rachel McAdams is simply perfect. She builds a complex, credible Linda, who goes from being a silent victim to an iron leader without ever losing her humanity. Dylan O'Brien, on the other hand, plays a character who is intentionally unlikable, predictable in his egotisms and meannesses, but he does it with great professionalism and a comedic timing that works.
Of course, not everything is flawless: sometimes the film seems to indulge too gratuitously in its taste for excess (the vomiting scene, for example), and there is constantly (perhaps intentionally) a sensation of "fake" in the air, little credible. But these are venial sins in a work that has the enormous merit of bringing back to the screen a Sam Raimi finally free, amused and amusing, wild and grotesque as in his heyday.
Send Help is, in the end, a return to the origins that doesn't smell like a nostalgia operation, but of an authentic pleasure of making cinema. And it reminds us, once again, why at least two generations of viewers grew up in the myth of Sam Raimi's cinema.
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