Sam Raimi is one of Hollywood’s finest purveyors of junk. I say this with love and reverence, and with full acknowledgment that he’s the man behind such masterpieces as Evil Dead II and A Simple Plan. But the director has spent decades digging for gold amid pulpier genres, turning out oddball horror, thriller, and comic-book movies. As his career went on, Raimi graduated to making blockbuster versions of junk, including the first Spider-Man trilogy and, most recently, a Doctor Strange sequel for Marvel. His new film, Send Help, however, is a welcome throwback to his roots—a horror-comedy full of spirited, violent silliness. It’s a perfect bit of shlock.
All credit to Raimi—he’s still able to deliver on a smaller scale, which his contemporaries (such as Quentin Tarantino and Robert Zemeckis) might now struggle to do. Send Help is breathtakingly unpretentious, a campfire tale that swirls a CEO’s nightmare with the fantasy of every bedraggled, overworked office drone: What if a plane crash stranded an evil boss in the jungle with a meek but capable subordinate, and their roles began to reverse? The story is essentially a stripped-down, airplane-novel version of Ruben Östlund’s Oscar-nominated Triangle of Sadness, which skewered the foolishness of capitalistic order by dumping a bunch of rich folks and service staff on a desert island.
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Send Help reduces that premise further by focusing on a party of two. Bradley Preston (played by Dylan O’Brien) is a preening nepo baby in charge of a multinational corporation, and Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) is a harried member of the planning-and-strategy department whom he just passed over for promotion. Bradley is largely concerned with perfecting his golf game; Linda spends her off hours obsessing over the TV show Survivor. After Bradley begrudgingly invites Linda to join him on a work trip, his private jet crashes in the Gulf of Thailand, stranding the pair on a remote beach, Linda’s devotion to Survivor suddenly gets put to good use. Raimi delights in turning a mousy, reality-TV-loving woman into a boar-hunting, shelter-building alpha dog.
McAdams, who did yeoman’s work in Raimi’s previous movie (the aforementioned Marvel sequel), is the perfect fit for this kind of nonsensical Hollywood role. She has somehow mastered the ability to plausibly toggle between retiring and glamorous. She was the terrifying queen bee of Mean Girls but also the sensible, slacks-wearing junior-string reporter from Spotlight; essentially, she’s someone who can play both a wallflower and a domineering megastar without a hint of ridiculousness. Raimi has always been drawn to that kind of protagonist, from Liam Neeson’s scientist turned superhero in Darkman to Tobey Maguire’s sweetly humble take on Peter Parker in Spider-Man. But with Linda, the director only gestures at the kind of good-hearted morality embedded within those costumed heroes. For the most part, Raimi is here to have sick, progressively more twisted fun.
Unlike his co-star, O’Brien has long seemed like one of showbiz’s underutilized resources. He emerged from the world of young-adult action-adventure franchises and has since proved to have a deeper set of chops: He turned in an excellent performance last year in the dark indie comedy Twinless and stood out among the ensemble in 2022’s The Outfit, a gangster thriller. Here, O’Brien is well attuned to portraying the kind of shallow jerk that Raimi needs viewers to root against—otherwise, they might turn on Linda more quickly for keeping Bradley under her thumb. Bradley is cruel, arrogant, and seemingly low on actual talent, and that’s before he crash-lands on an island; there, he spends most of his time grumping at Linda for not finding good-enough food or not listening to his meaningless leadership prattle.
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For the story’s first act, Raimi almost hints at romantic comedy—perhaps these two crazy kids will find some common ground while they’re stuck together, as Bradley learns to be a kinder boss and Linda figures out how to better stick up for herself. In the hands of a more optimistic filmmaker, maybe that would be the move. But then Linda goes chasing a wild boar through the jungle while toting a bamboo spear, and impales it to death in a gleefully gratuitous scene of CGI gore. She emerges bloodstained from the tree line—a changed woman, and not necessarily for the better.
The rest of Send Help hinges not on how these two characters will find common ground but on which one will emerge victorious from an ongoing power struggle. Sometimes they’re friendly, other times they’re openly battling, but Raimi never lets go of the core tension between them: Bradley sees Linda as less than him, and Linda sees Bradley as someone who will only really respond to domination. It’s Lord of the Flies on the corporate ladder, nudging the audience to simultaneously cheer for “eating the rich” and wonder whether Linda is losing her grip on reality. In most desert-island movies, the goal is for the characters to get rescued; to Linda, that’s merely a foolish distraction.
My overall view of the film came down to whether Raimi would nail the last act—I feared he might pull back into more sentimental territory rather than doubling down on the two characters’ ultimate enmity. I won’t spoil the details, but Send Help sticks the landing by going for broke, piling on the carnage, goo, and vomit as Linda and Bradley’s pas de deux spirals into feral madness. Last year, cinema wrestled with the limits of idealism and heroism on-screen; perhaps 2026 will be the “lol nothing matters” year in theaters. Or perhaps Raimi is just kicking it back to his more brazen early years as a director. Either way, I was happy reveling in the deplorability of it all.
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