Send Help: A Delicious Send-Up Of Hollywood Survival Thrillers
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Send Help is at once a deliriously funny horror movie and a shockingly scary comedy. Somehow, both tones co-exist without losing the essence of either. It’s an uncanny balance. Rahul Desai reviews.
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SAM RAIMI'S Send Help stars Rachel McAdams as Linda Liddle, a disgruntled corporate employee who finds herself stranded on an island with the sexist young CEO of the company after his private jet crashes into the ocean. She’s the better survivalist ( Survival is literally her favourite reality series), so the power dynamic is reversed on the island — and she starts to enjoy it a bit too much. Her injured but smug boss, Bradley, begins to rely on her like the volleyball Wilson might have depended on Tom Hanks in Cast Away. She likes his dependence. At some point, the two even threaten to enter romcom territory, what with the days and weeks of cohabiting and building sheds and cooking and hunting together. That’s how it goes: the two enemies fall in love, and their differences are fetishised. Stream the latest films and shows with OTTplay's Power Play monthly pack, for only Rs 149. |
But that’s the thing about Send Help. It is at once a deliriously funny horror movie and a shockingly scary comedy. Somehow, both tones co-exist without losing the essence of either. It’s an uncanny balance. Instead of using gags to diffuse the tension, it uses tension to diffuse the gags. There are times it borders on Adam-Sandler-level spoofy, particularly with the over-the-top gore and unexpected violence; there’s some slapstick in the plane-crash sequence itself, even though the ‘gravity’ of the incident is never in question. There’s also a wild-boar-killing debacle that would put the Scary Movie franchise to shame. But Danny Elfman’s Edward Scissorhands-coded score keeps hinting at something darker, especially while setting up the character of Linda. It’s clear that she’s not as goofy as such protagonists tend to be; years of oppression have taken a toll on her. She’s a bit unhinged right from the beginning, so what follows is cathartic in how the script keeps challenging our perception of the hunter-hunted game. Think Gone Girl meets Six Days Seven Nights. |
Humans, Animals & Nature: The Interwoven Tapestry Of Bahul Ramesh
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Across Bahul Ramesh's work, nature is never just a backdrop; it becomes a mirror, a witness, and sometimes an accomplice to human desire, guilt, and survival, writes Neelima Menon.
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MUCH HAS BEEN SAID about Bahul Ramesh’s growing preoccupation with the human–animal bond, a theme that has steadily taken centre stage in his recent work. Though Kishkindha Kaandam borrows its title from the monkey kingdom in Ramayana, in the film, the monkeys themselves drift in and out of the frame without carrying much narrative weight. But in Kerala Crime Files Season 2 and Eko, Bahul’s interest sharpens into something more specific, his fascination with canines and the emotional ecosystems that form between dogs and humans. These works move beyond metaphor and into a space where animals become mirrors, absorbing and reflecting the vulnerabilities, wounds, and contradictions of the people around them. The bonds he explores are not sentimental or surface-level; they are tangled, unsettling, and at times deeply revealing. In these narratives, dogs are not passive presences but active extensions of human psychology — witnesses, companions, enforcers, and, at times, victims of their handlers’ inner turmoil. WATCH | Kishkindha Kaandam and Kerala Crime Files season 2 are currently streaming on JioHotstar, now available with your OTTplay Premium subscription. |
At the heart of Dinjith Ayyathan’s Eko, written and shot by Bahul Ramesh, stands Mlathi Chedathi (Biana Momin), an elderly woman tucked away in a modest home perched on a hill. There is a Man Friday (Sandeep Pradeep) to help, along with a pack of fierce dogs holding fort. To the villagers below, she is someone they whisper about, with stories built from gossip and half-truths, mostly about her missing husband, Kuriachan. ALSO READ | Eko: Bahul Ramesh on how he ‘sacrificed’ a story to build his Animal trilogy As the title suggests, Eko: From the Infinite Chronicles of Kuriachan pieces together the myth and menace surrounding a man whose disappearance leaves behind a trail of enduring destruction. He seems to have unsettled, manipulated, and fractured the lives of many. And they are carrying that hurt like an open wound, resentment brewing quietly, as they move through the story with a shared hunger for answers, closure, and perhaps revenge. |
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