Send Help: Sam Raimi in distress (review)

After a detour to Marvel, the director of Evil Dead tries to get back on his feet by mixing social satire and survival in a horror comedy that runs dry, despite an unleashed Rachel McAdams.

Is Sam Raimi a fan of Ruben Östlund? We can ask ourselves the question before Send Helpwhich resembles a regurgitation of Without Filterthe Swedish troublemaker’s Palme d’Or, revised and corrected in a horrific B-series style. Caustic vision of class struggle, reversal of the balance of power between the dominant and the dominated during a trip that goes wrong, Robinsonade mixed with misanthropy… There are numerous echoes between the two films, right down to the splashes of vomit that dot them.

Östlund popcorn? The program is no dumber than any other. In any case, it is the one that Sam Raimi chose to return to a cinema that is a priori more offensive and bizarre, a formula that a priori suits his complexion better than the commissioned films in the service of the big Disney machinery that he has produced in recent years – his last two films to date were a prequel to Wizard of Oz (The Fantasy World of Oz2013) and a sequel to Doctor Strange (Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness2022).

From the start, however, we feel that something is wrong, that the former brat is not completely at ease in the register of social satire. Rachel McAdams plays Linda, an uncomfortable, frumpy office worker, constantly humiliated by her colleagues and superiors, and whose only friend in life is her pet. We should smile and be moved, as if we were meeting a little sister of Peter Parker, but the tone is so heavy, the caricature so strong, that we instantly understand that the film is going to weigh three tons.

Poor Linda will then find herself, thanks to a plane crash, stuck on a desert island in the company of her asshole boss (Dylan O’Brien). This is the moment when hierarchical relationships are reversed: he is injured and unable to do anything with his ten fingers, she is cut out for survival after having spent her life dreaming of participating in Koh Lanta. The toxic boss finds himself at the bottom of the social ladder, when Linda will be able to teach him the virtues of teamwork. Unless she takes advantage of the situation to take revenge for all these years of humiliation?

It is, therefore, The Office who meets Duel in the Pacific. Funny on paper, but quite ineffective in reality, Sam Raimi always seems to hesitate before the film he wants to make. The gory swerves are thus systematically defused, short-circuited, never brought to fruition, and only function as harmless recreations within a satire that is itself quite expected, whose little misanthropic music is not even disturbing, just mechanical. As for Raimi’s self-referential nods to his glorious, horrific past, they give the impression of being witnessing the comeback of an old rocker limply replaying his greatest hits.

Only the insane energy of Rachel McAdams, her ability to go from candor to gentle madness in the blink of an eye, allows the building to hold together. All this is all the more unfortunate because there is a pretty brilliant scene in the film: that of the crash, both terrifying and hilarious, which manages to encapsulate in a handful of minutes the whole point of Send Help on the truly nightmarish dimension of social Darwinism. But this will probably not be enough to console the fan club, which sees in the very title of the film the SOS of a filmmaker lacking inspiration.

Send Helpby Sam Raimi, with Rachel McAdams, Dylan O’Brien, Edyll Ismail… At the cinema on February 11.