Review: Send Help

Sam Raimi’s Send Help strands two people on a deserted island and then does the cruelest thing imaginable: it refuses to tell you, with any certainty, who deserves to be saved. What begins as a high-concept survival thriller quickly curdles into something sharper and stranger; a labor satire, a power-play psychodrama, and a gross-out morality tale that keeps slipping the moral high ground out from under your feet. It’s the most alive Raimi has felt in years, not because he’s louder or bloodier than usual, but because he’s once again fascinated by human pettiness, humiliation, and the thin membrane separating civility from savagery.

Rachel McAdams stars as Linda Liddle, a long-suffering corporate underling whose life has been quietly defined by invisibility. She’s smart, capable, and relentlessly prepared; traits that, in her corporate ecosystem, read as vaguely embarrassing rather than admirable. Her new boss, Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien), is the kind of nepo-baby executive who mistakes entitlement for leadership and condescension for charm. When Linda is dragged along on a company flight meant to solve yet another mess she didn’t create, the humiliation feels familiar and systemic. Then the plane goes down, and familiarity becomes irrelevant.

Raimi wastes little time stripping away the structures that once protected Bradley. On the island, capitalism is useless currency. Linda’s obsessive Survivor fandom and her lifelong habit of compensating for others suddenly become assets, while Bradley’s authority collapses under the weight of sunburn, injury, and incompetence. The early stretches play like a warped wish-fulfillment fantasy: the assistant thrives, the boss withers, and the natural world seems eager to punish the wrong man. Raimi stages these reversals with a mischievous glee, wringing comedy from physical suffering and bodily indignity without tipping fully into cruelty, at least not yet.

What makes Send Help compelling isn’t simply the reversal of power, but how unstable that reversal remains. Linda is not a cleanly drawn heroine. McAdams plays her as someone who has learned survival through accommodation, patience, and quiet resentment, tools that don’t disappear just because the office is gone. As Linda grows more confident, more at home in the island’s brutal logic, her competence begins to blur into control. Raimi is careful here, allowing small choices and tonal shifts to accumulate until you start questioning whether empowerment and domination have quietly traded places.

McAdams is extraordinary in navigating that moral slippage. Early on, she leans into Linda’s awkwardness without begging for sympathy, letting the character’s desperation to be liked curdle into something unsettling. Later, when Linda stops seeking approval altogether, McAdams lets the warmth drain from her performance just enough to keep you guessing. It’s a star turn built on restraint and discomfort, weaponizing McAdams’ inherent likability rather than relying on it. The film never pretends it can make her unattractive, but it understands that attraction itself can be a source of misjudgment.

O’Brien, meanwhile, resists turning Bradley into a cartoon villain. His cruelty is casual, ingrained, and bureaucratic, the kind that thrives in conference rooms and email chains. On the island, stripped of witnesses and consequences, that cruelty mutates. Bradley pleads, manipulates, regresses. Raimi finds dark humor in his unraveling, but he also allows flickers of humanity to surface just often enough to complicate the audience’s bloodlust. Watching Bradley suffer feels earned, but Raimi is too interested in power dynamics to let suffering remain simple. O'Brien's comedic reactions to the awful things put upon him reminded me of Bruce Cambell a bit.

Visually, Send Help favors clarity over spectacle. Raimi’s camera observes rather than flaunts, finding menace in proximity and tension in repetition. The gore is plentiful but purposeful, often funny before it’s horrifying, and always tied to character rather than shock for its own sake. A few late-film contrivances strain plausibility, and the ending arrives with an abruptness that feels more efficient than cathartic, but these are minor fissures in an otherwise tightly controlled descent.

Ultimately, Send Help is less about rescue than revelation. Its bleak joke is that no external salvation is coming; not from corporations, not from hierarchy, not even from decency. What remains is adaptability, resentment, and the stories we tell ourselves to justify survival. Raimi doesn’t offer comfort, but he does offer clarity, and in doing so delivers a survival thriller that’s as morally queasy as it is entertaining. You may not know who you want to see rescued by the end, but you’ll know exactly why that uncertainty feels so uncomfortably right.

4/5