This film will teach you that Rachel McAdams is not a force to be reckoned with. For his first horror film since 2008’s Drag Me to Hell, Sam Raimi promises you that she’s not someone you cross because they’re capable of being both your greatest asset and your worst nightmare. And thankfully, Send Help gives both. That’s not only applicable to Rachel McAdams’s Linda Liddle, but Sam Raimi’s own genre fusions make for an incredibly fun time from beginning to end. After all, if you’re stuck with a boss who sucks, what’s the worst thing that could happen when you and him are stuck on an island together? Not many filmmakers have a sick and twisted sense of humour that matches up to Sam Raimi’s, and he delivers with this return to the horror genre where he’d established himself.
When we first meet Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams), we’re seeing her as a hard worker, yet one who struggles in social environments together with her colleagues. Expecting a promotion from her late boss, the dreams are shattered once her former boss’s son, the annoyingly misogynistic Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien) ends up taking control of the company. Determined to prove herself after being humiliated in the office, she joins him on a business trip to Bangkok, where things go south fast. In the midst of their trip, the plane crashes, leaving the two of them stranded on an island in the Gulf of Thailand as the only survivors. Quickly enough, the power dynamic between Linda and Bradley shifts, with Bradley’s domineering attitude proving no match for Linda’s survival skills – leaving him no choice but to depend on her before they are rescued. It’s an easy formula to recapture, but Sam Raimi’s all about giving you a good time, and he doesn’t let up with Send Help.
Raimi manages to milk out the most of this premise with relative ease: first presenting itself as any other story about misogyny in the workplace, before transforming a mistreated character into the stuff of nightmares. Yet, we’re finding ourselves in a spot where we come to reconcile with the inevitable aftereffects of such mistreatment when the structures shift between an undervalued employee and the uptight boss. Rachel McAdams shows herself to be the perfect embodiment of such anger, given the physicality which she brings to this role as Linda Liddle. She’s delightful because she takes that socially awkward archetype before transforming into something more monstrous, with all that anger bottled up against Dylan O’Brien’s Bradley. It’s all in good fun, watching the socially awkward loner prove how tough she is against an egomaniac who believes himself on top of the world, ultimately leaving him no choice but to submit himself to her.
Yet, as the power shifts between the two of them, it also happens to be where Raimi brings in his twisted sense of humour into the picture. It all starts with how he’s taking this idea, which lends itself well to the horror genre, but allowing us to laugh at how the ridiculousness can be played up. Like many of Raimi’s past horror films, Send Help delivers on gore, projectile vomiting, with cheesy special effects to boot. These have all been part of Raimi’s most charming assets, for he has built his reputation on B-movies, so it would only fit that he continues playing along with it as if everything happening here were one sick, cruel joke. That’s also the perfect lead-up to something more intense, especially given how Linda proves her own strengths on the island to such a degree where she starts to enjoy life on this deserted island more than her work life.
Even then, it’s hard not to find yourself making parallels towards films like Lina Wertmüller’s Swept Away and Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness when observing the premise on paper. Sam Raimi isn’t really reinventing that wheel for survival films based on characters and the class structures they belong to, but he’s certainly one to bring forth pure entertainment as much as possible. He’s not nearly as incisive as Wertmüller’s takedown of the left vs. right ideologies within the survival context, yet he’s also managed to stick the landing far better than Östlund had done. Raimi isn’t concerned at all with realism, given that the pleasures from Send Help are purely delivered in genre thrills, though he’s finding himself at his best when he’s allowed to be playful. As every reveal is unveiled with Bradley and Linda begin acting off each other’s weak spots, it seems like he finds himself losing his steam, for it ends up feeling fairly generic by that point onward.
Send Help is a great deal of fun. Raimi doesn’t let up on B-movie glory as much as he’s able to, but he has only remained so deeply playful all his career, and it’s a great joy to watch. With McAdams and O’Brien playing off one another so perfectly, we’re always left in a spot where we find ourselves second-guessing how they would act within the moment, in their own bids for survival. For McAdams, the transformation from her socially awkward persona into a Jigsaw-esque figure is outlandish, but nonetheless entertaining to watch. The same can be said for O’Brien turning into a dominating boss into a submissive weakling, now on the receiving end of his mistreated employee’s humiliation. That may be enough for Send Help to serve as a PSA to the scumbag bosses who dare underestimate what their employees may be capable of, especially given the circumstances we witness here.
Watch the trailer right here.
All images via 20th Century Studios.
Directed by Sam Raimi
Screenplay by Damian Shannon, Mark Swift
Produced by Sam Raimi, Zainab Azizi
Starring Rachel McAdams, Dylan O’Brien, Edyll Ismail, Xavier Samuel, Chris Pang, Dennis Haysbert
Premiere Date: January 21, 2026
Running Time: 115 minutes
Cinema from the Spectrum 
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