Publication Date: 01-31-2026

Send Help (2026) review

Dir. Sam Raimi

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★★★

Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) is a hard-working yet undervalued manager at a strategic solutions company. It’s one of those quintessential movie companies where people slave away at their desks doing God-only-knows-what, like that Ed, Edd n Eddy episode where they build a business predicated on “going up.” Linda’s mousy demeanor and socially awkward ways have rendered her an office pariah. Her company’s CEO promised her a promotion to vice president, but his passing results in his cocky, dude-bro son, Bradley (Dylan O’Brien), assuming the reins and quickly informing Linda that he doesn’t view her as executive material. After all, she’s not his close friend, with whom he plays golf every weekend.

Bradley does decide to have Linda accompany him and his meathead cohorts on a business trip to Thailand. On the private jet ride there, a vicious storm tears the plane to pieces. Visually, it’s a cross between Final Destination and Evil Dead, as turbulence and whipping winds eventually causes the aircraft to be torn apart midflight, and director Sam Raimi relishes in showing us the bloody, cartoonish carnage. Washed ashore on an uninhabited island in the Gulf of Thailand, Linda and Bradley are the only two survivors, with Bradley nursing a serious leg injury. With her boss incapacitated, Linda fishes, hunts, builds a shelter, and starts to enjoy the fact that the power dynamics between her and her superior have been flipped.

Send Help is a delightfully depraved two-hander that makes great use of its single-setting. Let us rejoice in the fact that Sam Raimi has gifted us a pull-no-punches, R-rated, survivalist horror movie that entertains us on various levels. At its core are McAdams and O’Brien, whose performances evolve into something more impressive as we learn about their characters, and perhaps even question for whom we’re rooting overtime. McAdams — an absolute natural with a variety of comedy stylings, from Game Night to Mean Girls — seizes the opportunity to be both caustically witty and ferally expressive. There’s a scene where she hunts a (terribly computer-generated) wild boar with a makeshift spear. Less confident filmmakers, or those pressured by producers to keep the film at PG-13 sensibilities, would’ve likely had a shot of McAdams’ Linda screaming at the boar, spear aimed at its noggin, and then cut to the boar meat cooking on a fire. Such a move would be beneath Raimi, so naturally he shows us McAdams screaming and wailing as she splits the boar from skull to torso while the untamed beast vomits blood all over her face and chest.

O’Brien does solid work too, especially considering he has to play physically handicapped for much of the picture. At one point, he is completely incapable of moving, and his reactive, helpless, watering eyes lightly echo those of Daniel Kaluuya’s in Get Out. Once on the island, Damian Shannon and Mark Swift successfully transition the film into a shifty little two-hander where McAdams and O’Brien grapple with their situation and play off one another. When O’Brien’s Bradley acts as if he’s still in charge, bossing Linda around after she valiantly builds a shelter and gets a fire going, she takes her things and leaves. A terrific montage ensues as Raimi’s camera lingers on O’Brien’s expressions as hours seemingly turn into days and his helplessness grows during Linda’s absence.

For all the work Shannon and Swift do in subverting this B-movie concept by making it A-level work, one of their lone missteps comes during a surprising moment in the third act. Plausibility aside, the situation leads to Linda doing something that we simply don’t believe is in her nature, and it results in innocent parties being cruelly punished. It’s not the stark tonal shift that comes with the circumstance, for by this point, Shannon and Swift have amalgamated sardonic and uneasy tones with such poise. It’s the sour taste we get from seeing Linda do something we don’t believe, even under the circumstances, she’d be capable of doing.

It’s not an offense grand enough to derail a movie that manages to be the rare mainstream horror flick to curb your expectations. Fittingly too, Send Help‘s turbulence sets the stage for a smooth landing and a dastardly coda. The entire film subverts your line-of-thinking at various points, so much so that the only guarantee is the kind of zany, haunted house visuals and gratuitous uses of gore and vomit for which Raimi has become known. A longer-than-expected runtime (just under two hours) allows for this material to bake, and the passage of time to become opaque. That’s another factor that would ostensibly be a deterrence. However, when presented with two committed performers at odds over waffling power dynamics, under the guiding hand of a maestro of macabre, it’s time well-spent.

NOTE: To my surprise, I saw that Send Help was theatrically released in 3D, a move that felt so-very 2010s. Catherine and I elected to see it in the format. I’ll admit, the third-dimension doesn’t add a great deal to the film, save for one moment involving tuna fish, and the aforementioned sequence involving a wild boar. Other than that, it unnecessarily dims an otherwise bright movie, in more ways than one.

Starring: Rachel McAdams, Dylan O’Brien, Edyll Ismail, Xavier Samuel, Chris Pang, Dennis Haysbert, Thaneth Warakulnukroh, Emma Raimi, and Kristy Best. Directed by: Sam Raimi.