Sam Raimi’s Send Help sees Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien stranded on an island as the only survivors of a plane crash – with the twist being that he is her misogynistic boss, who has recently humiliated her. Black comedy and psychological horror combine in typical Raimi style and the film has earned him his best reviews in decades.
Danny Elfman has scored several of Raimi’s films and, while they fell out a while ago on Spider-Man 2, the pair have collaborated on each of the director’s last three projects. His score for Send Help is wonderfully subversive and covers absolutely vintage ground for the composer, recalling techniques he used in the earlier days of his career but filtered through his much more mature approach of recent times.
The score opens with the wonderful “Linda at Home”, a very catchy main theme for wordless female vocal – while not exactly setting the scene of what the score will become because of its sense of innocence (the composer admits that he found inspiration for it in the theme from Rosemary’s Baby), it’s a great introduction to it and the swirling circularity of the melody is a clear hint of the psychological twists to come. A prototypical Danny Elfman orchestral take on the theme comes a few tracks later in “Building Shelter” which is another melodic highlight.
Actually prototypical Elfman mannerisms are just everywhere in the score, much to my delight – the hint of Herrmann in “Underwater”, the weird clash of tonality in “Waiting to Die”, the way he places little fragments of his main theme all over the place but often buries them so deep in some other concoction that the listener can spend a lot of time playing a kind of musical Where’s Wally?
The real pleasure here is the way the composer mixes straight-up serious action music like “The Hunt”, “Diamond Ring” and “Jungle Fight” with deliberately over-the-top gothic stylings (“Poison Raft” and the macabre “Castration”) and the subversively beautiful (“Toilet Wine”), filled with irony. He does this with the kind of wit that really made his name as a film composer and it’s great to hear him get the chance to do that sort of thing again.
The album is consistently good but the last few tracks are a real treat. The bittersweet “Strategy and Planning” is for the most part a simple piece for piano and strings and it seems like it’s one whose emotional punch is for once not laced with irony until the late twist; then the irony very much returns in the solo flute version of the main theme (laced with some trademark “la la” vocals) in “Saving Yourself” and a terrific end credits piece which puts a rock spin on the theme. And it’s still not over because there’s a bonus track – satisfyingly called “Bonus Track” – with a lovely mellow take on the theme.
I’m a little surprised that Elfman hasn’t been receiving more attention for this one – much like last year’s Dracula, Send Help admittedly sees him exploring familiar territory, but in particular in this the sense of the composer revisiting ground from 30, 40 years ago is one I find to be really satisfying. It’s an absolute blast.
Leave a Reply