TL;DR: Send Help is Sam Raimi in gleeful sadist mode, delivering a sharp, funny, and vicious survival thriller powered by electric performances from Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien. It’s lean, mean, and wildly entertaining, proving that sometimes the best way forward is to strand great actors on an island and let them emotionally stab each other until the credits roll.
Send Help
I’m going to start this Send Help review the way my brain experienced the movie itself: a little breathless, slightly unhinged, and vibrating with the specific joy that only comes from watching a master filmmaker gleefully torture two incredibly attractive people on a beach. If the pitch of a Sam Raimi survival thriller starring Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien, trapped together on a tropical island and slowly unraveling like damp VHS tape left in the sun, sounds like your idea of cinematic comfort food, then congratulations. Send Help was basically engineered in a lab for you.
I walked into Send Help expecting a clever genre exercise. I walked out feeling like I’d just watched Raimi crack his knuckles, grin at the camera, and say, “Cool, let’s have some fun again.” This isn’t the multiversal maximalism of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, nor is it the pure splatter fairy tale of Drag Me to Hell. Instead, it’s Raimi stripping the engine down to its core components: two characters, one hostile environment, and a sadistic curiosity about how people reveal themselves when society’s safety net is ripped clean away.
Send Help opens in the soul-sucking purgatory of corporate America, which Raimi frames with the same barely suppressed menace he usually reserves for cursed buttons and demon goats. Rachel McAdams plays Linda Liddle, a relentlessly upbeat financial analyst who has spent seven years grinding herself into dust at Preston Strategic Solutions in hopes of earning a vice president role. She is aggressively nice in the way only deeply lonely people can be, the kind of person who brings homemade muffins to coworkers who don’t know her last name. She goes home to her bird, studies survival techniques, and dreams not of wealth or power, but of competing on Survivor. Immediately, my geek radar went off. Raimi loves underdogs. Raimi loves people the world underestimates. Linda might as well have been wearing a “future problem” sign around her neck.
Enter Dylan O’Brien as Bradley Preston, the human embodiment of a LinkedIn profile written by his father. Bradley is a nepo baby CEO who floats above consequences like a helium balloon tied to a trust fund. He’s dismissive, smug, casually cruel, and instantly convinced that Linda exists solely to make his life slightly easier. O’Brien plays him as a weaponized man-child, the kind of guy who has never had to learn empathy because money always arrived first. Raimi clearly delights in letting him be awful, and the movie smartly understands that audience loathing is fuel, not a flaw.
When a work trip overseas goes catastrophically wrong and their plane crashes into the ocean, stranding Linda and Bradley on a remote island, Send Help shifts gears with brutal efficiency. Civilization disappears. Hierarchies collapse. Suddenly, the woman who’s memorized shelter-building techniques for fun has value, and the man whose power relied on conference rooms and assistants has absolutely nothing. Raimi doesn’t waste time luxuriating in the novelty of survival tropes. He weaponizes them. Every coconut, every fire-starting attempt, every shared ration becomes a psychological pressure point.
What makes Send Help sing is how deliberately Raimi and screenwriters Damian Shannon and Mark Swift let the power dynamic oscillate. Linda begins the film as the social inferior, the ignored background character. On the island, she becomes something else entirely. McAdams charts this transformation with wicked precision. It’s not a superhero glow-up. It’s a survival glow-up. Her posture changes. Her voice steadies. Her eyes sharpen. There’s a moment early on where she catches her reflection in water and smiles, just slightly, and it sent a chill through me. This is a woman realizing that the world finally makes sense when it’s trying to kill her.
O’Brien, meanwhile, gets to dismantle Bradley layer by layer. The arrogance peels off first, followed by the entitlement, until what’s left is a scared, deeply unprepared human being forced to confront the vacuum where his character should be. Raimi has always loved grotesque comedy, and Bradley becomes a walking punchline in the best possible way. O’Brien commits fully, surrendering any shred of vanity as Bradley begs, schemes, sulks, and occasionally stumbles into genuine growth. There’s a Bruce Campbell-esque glee in how pathetic he’s allowed to be, and it works because Raimi understands that humiliation is narrative fertilizer.
The chemistry between McAdams and O’Brien is the engine that keeps Send Help roaring. Their relationship is never stable. One minute they’re allies, the next they’re adversaries, the next they’re something far more complicated and dangerous. Raimi stages their interactions like duels, each conversation a shifting battleground where emotional leverage matters as much as physical survival. I genuinely never knew whether a scene would end in laughter, violence, or intimacy, and that unpredictability is intoxicating.
And yes, because this is a Sam Raimi film, the violence absolutely slaps. The plane crash is a masterclass in chaotic clarity, filled with Raimi’s signature snap-zooms and visual punchlines that double as character setup. A boar hunt goes spectacularly wrong in a way that had my theater collectively recoiling. The gore arrives in bursts, not as constant noise, and each moment lands harder because Raimi understands rhythm. When he finally unleashes the bile, blood, and eye-related atrocities, it feels earned, like a cymbal crash after a long drumroll.
That said, Send Help isn’t flawless. The film occasionally reiterates points it’s already made effectively, particularly around Linda’s preparedness and Bradley’s uselessness. There are moments where the screenplay underlines themes with a marker when a pencil would’ve done. Danny Elfman’s score, while functional, doesn’t reach the operatic heights I associate with Raimi’s best collaborations. It does its job, but rarely demands attention, which feels like a missed opportunity given how heightened the film becomes.
Still, these are nitpicks in a movie that radiates purpose. Send Help feels like Raimi reconnecting with the kind of storytelling that made him a legend in the first place. It’s cruel, funny, character-driven, and deeply interested in the idea that who we are in society might be completely irrelevant when stripped of structure. Linda and Bradley aren’t just surviving the elements. They’re surviving each other, and the movie’s sharpest insight is that this might be even harder.
By the time Send Help reaches its final act, I was fully locked in, grinning like an idiot as Raimi twisted the knife with theatrical flair. It’s a film that understands how thin the line is between civility and savagery, and how quickly that line evaporates when the rules disappear. Watching McAdams and O’Brien dance across that line is a blast, equal parts unsettling and exhilarating.
