Send Help Review: This Giggle-Inducing Nastiness Is Exactly What I Want From Sam Raimi

One of the things that I respect most about Sam Raimi as a director is the impressive genre variety that can be found in his filmography. He got his start by making one of the most legendary horror titles of all time in 1981’s The Evil Dead, but he has refused to be pigeonholed, and be it a thriller, a western, a baseball drama or superhero blockbuster, “a Raimi movie” cannot be specifically defined (beyond elements of his signature style, of course).

That being said… there is also what could perhaps be described as a more selfish side of me that doesn’t particularly care about him exploring the range of his creative expression and wishes that he just dedicated his entire career to making scary movies. Simply put, he is really goddamn good at it, and he makes them all too rarely. Send Help, his first big screen contribution to the genre since 2009’s Drag Me To Hell, only reinforces this fact, as it properly delivers as a dark, gross delight.

While Rachel McAdams isn’t specifically recalled as one of the more memorable presences in Raimi’s Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness, she is brilliant in a film that takes the basic premise of Lina Wertmüller’s Swept Away, but strips out all of the romance and substitutes it with some Misery vibes. It’s a mean little movie with impish sensibilities that offers dark fantasy in an analysis of gender and class dynamics, and it offers a tense ride with its main characters while inspiring plenty of sinister giggles.

McAdams plays the appropriately named Linda Liddle – a smart, resourceful lonely woman with a nerdy energy that puts off her colleagues at work. Despite her lack of popularity, she has all of her hopes pinned on a big promotion that she hopes will help improve her life, but all of that goes to hell when her boss dies and leaves the company in the hands of his entitled and sexist son Bradley (Dylan O’Brien), who proceeds to give the open job to a golfing buddy.

As a consolation prize, Bradley invites her to come along to an important business meeting in Bangkok, and while he plans to fire her at the end of the trip, he never gets the chance because their plane crashes midflight. The two of them end up being the only survivors and stranded on island, he with a badly injured leg, and it’s a circumstance that flips their relationship: while he is desperate and skill-less, Linda is a devoted Survivor fan who knows exactly what to do to survive and he is thusly at her mercy.

Send Help is a different kind of revenge movie built on a great dynamic between its two main characters.

As seen in the aforementioned Swept Away or, to a lesser extent, Ivan Reitman’s Six Days, Seven Nights, the premise could easily veer into romantic comedy/drama territory, with the feuding characters able to see past their mutual distaste and develop feelings for one another, but that kind of fantasy has no real place in the vision of Sam Raimi and screenwriters Damian Shannon and Mark Swift. While it’s a symphony of many different notes, it’s a revenge movie at heart that offers some delicious catharsis that hits strongly as we exist here in the early weeks of 2026.

There is some key needle-threading going down, as it’s not totally satisfied with just being black and white story: there are layers to Bradley that are uncovered that reveal him as a bit more than just an arrogant nepo baby; and Linda is hardly a saint, and the movie makes no efforts to excuse her worst behavior. At the same time, however, it never loses track of who its protagonist and antagonist are, and minus a narrative lull in the second act, it’s consistently satisfying to see our heroine outplay her foe as he refuses to properly grow as a person.

Rachel McAdams is a true joy to watch while Dylan O'Brien effectively makes you hate his guts.

A great deal of credit is owed to both Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien, as a great weight is put on the pair as the only characters for the vast majority of the runtime, but they both offer the ideal charisma that Linda and Bradley require as characters.

Initially, there is a bit of suspension of disbelief required as you are meant to believe that a woman who looks like Rachel McAdams would be the biggest loser at her job (even with the layer of “bird mom” energy that is applied via production stylists) – but it’s nonetheless super fun to see her transform into the best version of herself while she is stranded, and the actor’s pep is perfect as the character fully embraces the wholly new lifestyle that has been thrust upon her.

O’Brien has what might be considered the more thankless job, as one of the key aspects of his turn is being so detestable as to inspire the sadistic side of the audiences’ imaginations, but to his credit, he does it impressively well without ever being cartoonish. The Maze Runner star properly imbues the character with the all-too-familiar energy of a man who believes that the world owes him everything despite contributing nothing, and he nails the blend of anger, fear and panic that evolves from him losing all of his unearned power.

Send Help features the exact silly nastiness that is a staple of Sam Raimi horror movies.

Linda and Bradley go through quite a lot together, and those who know about Sam Raimi’s proclivities as a director know that he likes to be the guy who is personally spraying his actors with blood and all manners of goop in the more intense sequences of his movies. Watching, Send Help, one can tell that he had an absolute ball during production, as the film offers wonderful nastiness aplenty – captured with the unique flare in cinematography and editing that never lets you forget who is at the helm of this picture.

The tone is first set in this department with the spectacular plane crash sequence (an appetizer of cinematic schadenfreude to whet the palate for what’s to come), and it serves course after course of icky at every opportunity with amazing special effects, from Linda hunting a wild boar to a final confrontation that I will only lightly tease in this spoiler-free space.

While recognizing that Sam Raimi is not nearly as prolific now as he was back in the 1990s, it’s a lightly upsetting thing that we had to wait nearly two decades for his newest proper contribution to the horror cinema canon – but now that we have Send Help, we can at least say that it was totally worth the wait. Forty-five years after the premiere of The Evil Dead, the man still has a genius knack for making audiences squirm, and it only further cements his important place in genre filmmaking history.