Send Help (2026) Review

The ebb and flow of the film’s central dynamic keeps you on your toes and there are certainly some curve balls thrown here and there.

Sam Sewell-Peterson

Feb 10, 2026

Send Help (2026)

Director: Sam Raimi

Screenwriters: Damian Shannon, Mark Swift

Starring: Rachel McAdams, Dylan O’Brien, Edyll Ismail, Xavier Samuel, Chris Pang, Dennis Haysbert

by Sam Sewell-Peterson

Castaway meets Misery is a good elevator pitch, but you likely won’t guess exactly where the latest Sam Raimi film - his long-awaited return to original filmmaking after a 17 year hiatus - is going. Send Help, at least up until its final act, is among the least horror-inflected Raimi films to date, but it does come loaded with his usual sense of mischief, his love of really putting his actors through the wringer, and his childlike amusement at geysers of bodily fluids.

What if you were stranded on a desert island with the worst boss in the world? What if you were stranded on a desert island with an employee who is better at everything than you? After being passed over for promotion despite her dedication and hard work, Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) travels with her young boss Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien) and his executive team to Thailand to prove herself. But when their plane crashes on a remote tropical island leaving Linda and Bradley as the sole survivors, the tables turn and he has to rely on her for his life.

It’s nice to have a survival film that starts with the importance of a sensible pair of shoes and builds out from there. Linda is literally introduced to us shoes first as she steps out of the elevator. You very well might learn something useful from the survival strategies Linda demonstrates in this film, not to mention how to turn an inhospitable - though beautifully filmed, thanks to D.O.P. Bill Pope - environment against someone who really needs to be taught a lesson.

Raimi doesn’t really do subtlety, but over the past 25 years he has used his films to champion the common man and push everyday struggles to extremes in order to comment on everyday financial and professional struggles. Think of Peter Parker/Spider-Man trying to balance superhero duties with both studying and part-time work to pay rent on a crappy apartment, or Drag Me to Hell’s Christine putting her hard-fought career advancement ahead of her morals and getting cursed for her trouble. Linda does everything she can to fit in with office culture and goes above and beyond, hoping she will finally be rewarded with a position befitting her talents, but because she’s a bit awkward, a fan of eating tuna sandwiches in an open-plan workspace, and definitely not “in” with the right people, she never stands a chance.

You think Raimi has already hit his quota of splatter early on when both his stars get face-fulls of boar blood (following an action scene that repurposes the floaty Evil Dead vision as the POV of a very angry wild piggy) but he then proceeds to jet torrents of horrible stuff at them at every opportunity and when you least expect it, to hilarious effect.

Raimi uses whip pans creatively; not in the usual way they are employed in horror films, but rather to show the passage of time. Bradley initially arrogantly dismisses Linda when he regains consciousness and so to teach him a lesson she leaves him to his own devices for an entire day, each whip pan edit to his increasingly delirious and sunburnt face mounting tension and becoming more darkly comic.

Rachel McAdams has one of the warmest megawatt smiles in Hollywood, so it’s rather disconcerting to learn just how little more she needs to push it to become a deranged grin. It’s a powerhouse performance that can change from endearing to terrifying at a moment’s notice, Linda evolving (or devolving) from submissive and nice to dominant and ruthless. She pairs off effortlessly with O’Brien who plays the bro-y toxic male so well, but brings a real deep-rooted vulnerability to Bradley as time progresses.

Linda’s bubbly personality and positive attitude, not to mention her extensive knowledge and skills cribbed from obsessively watching every season of Survivor, makes her the ideal person to be trapped on a desert island with. Despite this, she gets under Bradley’s skin as everything he is not, a constant reminder he has lost all of his authority and power in this world where he can no longer leverage his usual position of privilege or fail upwards by virtue of his sex.

The ebb and flow of the film’s central dynamic keeps you on your toes and there are certainly some curve balls thrown here and there. You might question whether Linda and Bradley both looking photogenic enough for a shampoo advert as they fight for their lives works or not. This might have also worked better as a tighter, leaner thriller as it starts to run out of steam in the final few scenes, though at the same time this allows Raimi to indulge in his usual cheer-worthy gnarly excesses, so it’s hard to begrudge him that.

Send Help is a twisted, funny desert island thriller that gives its two leads an idyllic playground to explore toxic work relationships and power imbalances with some visceral, peek-through-your-fingers bodily trauma. Sam Raimi isn’t just a horror director, but he’ll always bring a certain amount the genre he’s best known for to whatever project he brings to fruition, and when the end result is this entertaining and timely, you have to say bring on the next one.

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