Send Help pits Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien against each other in a twisted desert island tale that effortlessly combines comedy and horror, and proves to be as unsettling as it is ultimately satisfying.
Sam Raimi is always one of the stars of a Sam Raimi movie. The director had Bruce Campbell acting as his avatar in the Evil Dead flicks, while Spider-Man and Doctor Strange obviously top-lined his comic book era, but Raimi has a tone and style that’s all his own.
In terms of visual flourishes, you can expect dynamic camerawork, Dutch angles, snap zooms, extreme closeups, and the famous ‘Raimi-cam’ POV shot. There’s also likely to be slapstick violence inspired by classic cartoons, jump scares nestled between sudden tonal shifts, and blasts of bodily fluid.
Send Help is filled with those trademark touches, in service of a morbid comedy that delivers big laughs, shocks, and scares.
What is Send Help about?
Send Help revolves around office worker Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams), who has toiled away in the ‘Strategy and Planning’ department of her company for years, and been promised a big promotion by the firm’s President.
But when his son Bradley Preston takes over, she makes a terrible first impression. Which we quickly learn is irrelevant, as Preston has no intention of rewarding her hard work, with that promotion going to one of his golfing buddies.
Bradley decides to take Linda on a Bangkok trip to help get a forthcoming merger over the line, but then plans to send her to a satellite office, so he no longer has to look at her face, or smell her lunchtime tuna.
But on that trip their plane tragically – and spectacularly – crashes in a superb airborne sequence; one that sees Linda lost at sea, then washed up on a desert island.
Bradley also appears on said isle, but unconscious and badly injured. Which is when the tables start to turn, due to Linda’s very specific set of skills…
Who is Linda Liddle?
That’s because Linda cuts an awkward and lonely figure in the film’s first few scenes, with no buddies at work, and a pet bird her only friend at home. But she fills her time with a hobby bordering on obsession, which is a love of reality series Survivor.
Linda never never misses an episode, reads every book and guide on both lasting and thriving in the wilderness, and even auditioned for the show; a clip that Bradley and his finance bros find, and which functions as a smart bit of exposition for the movie, revealing the extent of her skills.
All of which puts the usually dominant Bradley on the back-foot when he awakens. Finding himself incapacitated while she sorts food, fire, and shelter, he lashes out by criticising her work, and reminding Linda that she works for him.
But Linda is done being a doormat, so in response departs with her survival know-how to another part of the island, staying away until Preston is at death’s door, at which points Send Help becomes less Castaway, and more Misery.
She returns and states “We’re not in the office anymore,” before instructing Bradley to never “mistake my kindness for weakness.” And so the psychological warfare begins – a conflict that escalates in (just-about) believable fashion, as the mismatched exiles battle, betray, and back-stab each other for the next hour.
McAdams and O’Brien deliver deliriously entertaining turns
That smart set-up, and the deliciously nasty payoffs that follow, are the work of screenwriting duo Mark Swift and Damian Shannon, who know scares from their Friday the 13th and Freddy vs Jason days, and jokes via their work on Shark Tale and the Baywatch movie.
Send Help expertly balances the two mediums, while dispensing just the right amount of context and backstory to ensure that sympathies shift, skeletons in cupboards surprise, and events keep you guessing until the twisted final reel.
They’ve also found a fine foil for their work in Raimi, as while superficially it doesn’t have much in common with his 2009 classic Drag Me to Hell, in terms of delivering rollercoaster thrills within a jet-black comedy, it feels like a spiritual sequel.
Raimi draws deliriously entertaining performances from his two leads, with O’Brien clearly having fun as a seemingly irredeemable corporate bully, and McAdams initially playing against type as the retiring wallflower, before transforming before our eyes as the island awakens something within her.
But the film is best when Raimi and longtime cinematographer Bill Pope are crafting their big action and horror sequences, from Linda battling a wild boar – where we get piggy POV! – to the heroes/villains coming to blows like they are in a particularly violent Looney Tune.
They’re scenes in which blood, snot, and vomit rain down upon the characters, and you just know that Raimi was cackling behind the camera while putting his actors through hell.
Is Send Help good?
Due to the dark nature of the subject matter, and the frequently unpleasant behaviour of the central characters, Send Help won’t be for everyone. Equally Sam Raimi’s hyper-kinetic visuals and sick sense of humor can be an acquired taste.
There’s a jump-scare which harks back to his Evil Dead days; one that longtime fans might like, but feels at odds with everything else in the movie. While a twist is sign-posted a little too clearly early on, meaning most will doubtless see it coming.
But the narrative doesn’t rely on such an about-turn, and if you can stomach the horror, and enjoy watching morally ambiguous stories about the awful ways in which we humans are capable of treating each other given the opportunity, Send Help is a riot from beginning to end.
Send Help score: 4/5
Send Help is released in US cinemas on January 30 2026, while it hits UK screens on February 5.
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