Flasz On Film

You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, the saying goes. But why would you do that when the dog in question is perfectly comfortable with the tricks he’s learned as a puppy? He’ll probably begrudgingly try to humor you while thinking he could be doing his old tricks instead. Or maybe he’ll want to somehow find a way to learn a new tricks that is sufficiently close to the old tricks he knows but it looks new enough that it would make him look good.

The dog in question is Sam Raimi who has spent the better part of this century working on movies that weren’t necessarily in his wheelhouse, but into which he tried to breath enough of his own personality and style to make everyone think that he had indeed added a few new tricks into his directorial arsenal. Now, having left the Mouse House of Conformity ruled by the Marveluminati—well, not quite because his newest film is produced by what’s used to be Fox, which is owned by the House of Mouse—Raimi decided to reconnect with the kind of filmmaking he used to be associated with before he stepped behind the camera to make Spider-Man in 2002 and directed himself a survival horror.

Send Help is very much a throwback to Raimi’s formative years. This seemingly simple narrative about two people shipwrecked on a desert island in the aftermath of a plane crash—a resourceful yet meek and marginally cringy corporate workhorse Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) and her jerk CEO boss Bradley (Dylan O’Brien)—promises a perfect setup for some gory shenanigans. What looks like paradise from afar and gives Linda an opportunity to pretend she is a competitor in Survivor is nothing but torture to Bradley who is used to a life of wealth, excess and ceaseless attention from his subordinates. Not to mention the fact that he finds Linda, her quirks and earnestly upbeat demeanour utterly detestable. So, you might expect that what the movie will essentially lead towards will be a bloody orgy of chaos where the camera gets up close and personal with the actors in the most uncomfortable way as fountains of fake blood, gore, and other bodily fluids cover the screen in the consequence of character tensions coming to a head. Because that’s what Sam Raimi has always been about, right? Like his Evil Dead movies or Drag Me to Hell.

Well, yes. But not quite. This is a common mischaracterization of Raimi’s style, proclivities and interests that effectively narrows them down to those iconic genre elements people tend to remember the most from Evil Dead II, Army of Darkness or Darkman. Gross, obnoxious, in your face and kinetic. And weirdly cheeky. That’s Raimi’s style in a nutshell as far as the general understanding of his legacy is concerned. But there’s more to it and it is all perfectly on display in Send Help.

Underneath his interest in making visceral and over-the-top genre experiences that tested both the boundaries of good taste and viewer’s ability to sit through a near-constant sensory onslaught, Raimi has always been a fan of the Old Hollywood. In fact, there is a reason why Army of Darkness looks cartoonish and it is because it is essentially a Disney movie with gore and squibs. Why do you think Raimi always wanted to make Oz the Great and Powerful if not because he is a massive fan of The Wizard of Oz? Even his take on the Green Goblin in Spider-Man was a foreshadowing of the Wicked Witch of the West. All of his movies hark back, in one way or another, to the Golden Age of Hollywood while also synthesizing other, more modern or disparate, cinematic touchpoints and incorporating them all into Raimi’s toolbox.

Therefore, while it is still correct to identify Send Help as Sam Raimi’s return to his home turf because the movie decidedly looks like the kind of stuff he used to do before he started pointing the camera at men in spandex, it is also helpful to understand that underneath it all, it is very much Raimi’s take on the canonical screwball comedy. There is a reason why Linda Liddle looks the way she does with her anachronistic costuming and on-the-nose characterization that makes her look like a character that could have been played by Katharine Hepburn in 1939, or her unrelated namesake Audrey a decade thereafter. Even her name sounds completely out of time. In fairness, the entire movie is set up to resemble a formula of a screwball rom-com from nearly a century ago, starting with the workplace culture, telegraphed motivations and the entire setup of two completely incompatible characters—one mouthy and loud and the other brooding and objectionable—marooned on a desert island. This is a base from which Raimi launches his movie into chaos.

That’s his recipe after all. The movie lures us into what looks like a manufactured conceit in which we have to grit our teeth and cringe at Linda’s antics and then almost immediately cuts through this Golden Age nostalgia with some prime gore, blood and mayhem. Let’s just say that if Katharine Hepburn starred in a screwball rom-com with Cary Grant where they both were stranded on a beach, she wouldn’t be asked to kill a wild boar the way Rachel McAdams did. But that’s what you get in Send Help: an incredibly compelling clash of iconographies where that canonical screwball goes into overdrive and sees who could have been a Cinderella-type beauty “uglified” by dint of having to wear horn-rimmed glasses covered head to toe in pig blood while screaming bloody horror in the most primal way imaginable. This is what you get out of a prime Raimi experience: not only a genre medley but a biphasic—seemingly immiscible—mixture of aesthetic sensibilities that are sown together with a bloodied thread of onscreen violence and injury detail.

But there’s a twist to it that elevates Send Help a few notches up. Not only does this film relish in its “gorification” of classic Hollywood tropes, but it also uses its central narrative predicament as a basis to borrow a few other bits from elsewhere. As the movie becomes a battle of wits between what looks like Raimi-fied screwball archetypes, an opportunity emerges to push things further and introduce extra tension by giving Linda an upper hand. After all, she’s the more seasoned outdoorswoman, while her boss is injured and completely useless. He can’t even spell “HELP” using sticks, and instead writes “HEPL.” Which puts Linda in a position of having to take care of a man she is incredibly conflicted about, while also hiding (and not very well, either) the fact that her character quirks may be a bit more sinister.

Thus, Send Help adds another layer of delicious complexity to its narrative makeup and morphs into Misery on the beach built on that screwball foundation. And this new setup comes with its own opportunities to push some buttons—if you saw or read Misery, you might have an idea where it all might go—and force the viewer to exercise their buttocks by clenching them in a few sequences of incredible unease, tension and violent exhilaration.

In consequence, Raimi’s new movie is not only a return to form because of what it does and the way it goes about doing so, it is a reminder that at least in his own comfort zone Raimi can still dazzle and dazzle well. Furthermore, the way Send Help goes about interlacing these ideas plucked out of the screwball toolbox and Misery (and if you squint just a tiny bit, you will also find some vestigial references tracing back to The War of the Roses too) serves not only the genre spectacle, which is overwhelmingly exhilarating, intense and perfectly cheesy, but also whatever thematic discussion you might want to have on the way home.

After all, there’s enough breathing space in this narrative to see Send Help as a genre dismantling of corporate sexism and an in-your-face wish fulfillment revenge fantasy. The movie deliberately puts the meek Linda in a position of complete authority and gives her jerk boss a taste of his own medicine. It’s a movie that ultimately glorifies subject matter competence as it triumphs over bluff, bluster and privilege. Call it a class vengeance too, if you wish. It will still work as a genre-tinged vendetta in which the powerless subordinates rise against and emasculate their overlords who have been in positions of power and influence for no other reason than “just because.” That boys’ club of lewd office jokes, douchebaggery in suspenders and power imbalances based on sex gets a run for its life here.

And if that’s not a good enough reason to go out and see Send Help, I don’t know what to tell you. It’s most definitely one of the first movies in 2026 that might still be in conversation about the most entertaining films of the year in December, that is unless a metric tonne of even greater films drops on our heads in the intervening months. A hybrid of Raimi’s longstanding interests freshened up with ideas plucked from other corners of the movie culture, and jazzed up with incredible intensity, this movie is a phenomenal genre spectacle that is as smart as it is fun.