Send Help
Sam Raimi used to be seen as a maverick director who specialized in wild, bizarre and quirkily grotesque horror features, but as more time has passed and more creatives have been allowed to express their weird sides, his usually styling didn’t feel as universally special anymore (not helped by the fact that he stretched himself into other genres and films that didn’t allow him to flex his personality like For the Love of the Game, Oz: The Great and Powerful and even to some extent, his Spider-Man trilogy). However, his time away allowed his identity to shine much brighter when it came back, and his 2026 survivalist dark comedy, Send Help, felt like a nice return to form for him.
After slaving away as a corporate strategist for several years, meek-mannered but dedicated worker, Linda Liddle (played by Rachel McAdams) is expecting to receive her long-awaited promotion now that her former boss’ son, Bradley (played by Dylan O’Brien) has taken over the company, but Bradley has little regard for Linda and plans to stick her in a dead-end position after dragging her along for a business trip in Bangkok. While on route, the plane unexpectedly crashes, leaving only Linda and Bradley alive to wash up on a deserted island, and with Bradley’s leg being busted up, Linda is forced to tap into some survival skills (which she picked up from watching several episodes of Survivor) to keep herself and her jerky boss alive. While Bradley tries to assert his superiority on her once again, she finally gets a feeling of control and lets him get a taste of his own medicine, and as Linda starts to enjoy this survivalist life more than her old one, she does everything to keep a hold of it, as well as Bradley (who she has grown attracted to). But when help does come to find them and Bradley starts to catch onto her true intentions, she’ll go to whatever extreme to not lose this new life.
With strong reviews out the gate and a decent box office hold, Send Help feels like a return to form for Sam Raimi and offers a wild, comically gruesome and unpredictable getaway trip that isn’t high on depth or nuanced writing, but will keep you entertained the entire time.
While he was always in the public consciousness for his work on The Evil Dead series and contributions to popular brands like Spider-Man and Wizard of OZ, Sam Raimi strangely hasn’t made too many horror films, dabbling in other genres through movies like Darkman, Simple Plan, For the Love of the Game, and The Gift. While this variety allowed him to flourish as a director, it was this specific personality that made him so appealing during the 80s, and he relived this success briefly with Drag Me to Hell (a critical and commercial success that was praised for its return to form for the filmmaker). With this in mind, history seems to be repeating with Send Help, as the general consensus is that it feels like a classic Sam Raimi horror comedy with all the expected cheese, gore and insanity to boot. While he’d dipped his toe back into his old ways with Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, it felt suffocated by Marvel’s overly widespread storytelling, so this movie can say that it took the title back with glorious results. This movie is a ton of fun, will offer plenty of chuckle worthy moments that can also make you wince, is extremely cheesy and isn’t held down by the realms of reality, and despite containing a few plot points that are easy to pick up on, isn’t entirely clear where it’s heading and does keep your attention by continually escalating the situation and the mood with every passing day.
With that said, while Raimi’s involvement helps bring a sense of wacky color and craziness to a pretty standard survival story, it also feels like he gets in the way of what could’ve been brought out of this premise. Being coined as a mixture between Misery and Cast Away, the concept is actually pretty great, with a constantly undervalued employee turning the tables on her jerky boss and getting a power high when the roles are reversed while deserted, could say a lot of about the dynamics within the corporate space, like what causes people to abuse their power, does their environment impact how they treat others, and how damaging is the mental anguish experienced by those who are mistreated in such an unfair manner. While this sounds great on paper, the film isn’t written like these points were intentional, but rather accidently stumbled upon when only a simple quirky horror comedy was intended, and this is probably due to the screenwriters. Damian Shannon and Mark Swift don’t have the best track record when it comes to writing horror (they wrote Freddy vs. Jason and the 2013 remake of Friday the 13th), and therefore probably weren’t able to add onto the idea in a way that could really dissect and analyze it. While still a fun time and arguably their best script, you do lament what could’ve been if it had a bit more thought put behind it.
Much like Raimi, Rachel McAdams had been out of the spotlight for a bit, and alongside her co-star Dylan O’Brien (who previously rose to fame for playing one of the leads in the hit supernatural MTV teen drama, Teen Wolf) received strong early buzz for how well they worked within Raimi’s personality, and it really shows. While playing fairly stock roles and being stuffed with enough hyperactive pills and childish glee to fill an entire kindergarten ward, the two are very entertaining and never get boring to watch even though they take up a majority of the solo time. McAdams actually has a pretty fun character in Linda, being an overly dedicated and slightly crazy office employee who constantly gets the shaft and is so thrilled to be living her outdoorsy fantasy that she’ll do anything (even murder) in order to keep that fantasy going, and McAdams does great at taking her usually chirper and congenial nature and weaponizing it with a psychotic twinge to result in a fascinating performance to witness from an actress who can be hit-or-miss. Dylan O’Brien also plays a smug pampered little brat very well, adopting the over-the-top sensibilities of Raimi pretty nicely with a performance that is certainly extreme, but has just enough believability during the quieter moment to not feel like a complete trope.
While McAdams and O’Brien are the only characters given focus, the supporting cast also look like they’re having a ball with their very brief moments. Edyll Ismail channels her inner demon in a very nothing role as O’Brien’s fiancé, Xavier Samuel evokes similar levels of uptight jerkiness as O’Brien but is composed in a less obvious fashion (which ironically makes him come across as even more jerky), and everyone else is playing things in a more in-your-face fashion, but never go too far that it takes you out of the moment.
One of the pluses of early Raimi horror films was their sporadic nature, unpredictability of whether to expect a fright or a laugh, and the insane and visceral levels of gore and bodily mayhem on display, and while Send Help can’t reach the levels of something like Evil Dead (which was its own little deranged entity that’ll arguably never be recreated), it does have enough of that gooiness to still deliver something pretty unforgettable from a visual perspective. While the budget is pretty small for a modern feature of about $30 million, it doesn’t feel like the film isn’t using it for much beside an occasional location shot and its actors, as the film seems to intentionally have terrible effects.
While it is more common to see movies with garbage visuals effects that feel far below their production budget, Raimi is known for producing effects that either range from impressive practical work to truly garbage special trickery, and this movie is no different, with terrible green-screening, pretty fake looking environments, and animals that looks so cartoonishly expressive that it’s one step away from looking like a demon (mainly a specific scene involving a boar). This fakeness isn’t a detractor though as the film knows it’s a crazy hyper exaggerated reality and has fun with how it can go crazy, weird and distinctly Sam Raimi, with camera work by Peter Deming that’s delightfully odd with very intimate close-ups and strange pans, and a musical score by Danny Elfman who makes what could feel like a gritty psychological scenario and turn it into a playfully spooky romp that revels in watching these two turn more and more monstrous.
Send Help isn’t the remarkable landmark cult film that Evil Dead was, nor does it reach the levels of unexpected craziness of Drag Me to Hell, but in a film landscape where Sami Raimi’s style of horror has been sorely missed, it’s nice to see him return with an original film that unabashedly has his qualities. The concept is tragically not taken full advantage of due to the decent but shallow scripting and for those expecting a full-on bloodbath, it’s more of a platter cleanser back into his style rather than a nosedive, but for those who’ve been looking for classic Raimi to return, this will definitely be an entertaining getaway.