‘SEND HELP’ Is a Desert Island Movie With Loads of Bad Blood

Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) may be ultra-competent in her strategic planning role at work—and a fastidious survivalist to boot—but she lacks the social skills required to climb the corporate ladder. This is drawn into sharp focus when she’s passed over for a promised VP role after company heir Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien) steps into the CEO role and kills her chances of a promotion. Insult compounds injury when she spies the entire C-suite laughing at her Survivor audition tape. But it seems Linda may have the last laugh when their chartered private jet to Thailand crash-lands on a deserted island and only her extensive survival know-how can save the day.

When we first meet her, Linda may be a bit uncouth; hygienically not put together, socially awkward, and with the wardrobe choices of someone three times her age. But after her crash landing, those mousy insecurities fade into full-blown Mother Island hot. She can build shelter, start fires, fish, hunt. She knows the local flora and fauna, what’s poisonous and what’s not. Bradley, meanwhile, is about as helpful as tits on a mouse. His earlier dismissal of Linda quickly comes back to bite him.

Fun but flawed, Send Help is a campy desert island movie that revels in the bad blood and animosity between Linda and Bradley. At first, he continues to treat her as a subservient figure. With time and a little carefully applied pressure, he comes to realize there’s a new pecking order, and he’s no longer at the top. This re-orientation of boss and employee dynamics is played for laughs, but there’s some real recompense packed in there too, especially as Linda comes to realize that maybe she prefers the island life of leading the pack, calling the shots, and wielding the only knife, rather than being back home in her cubicle, surrounded by coworkers who don’t even pretend to like her.

Unfortunately, the bad blood isn’t just limited to the story. Some of it seeps into the filmmaking itself, with Raimi’s increasing reliance on CGI creating a kind of tonal whiplash that pokes out like a compound fracture. Whereas he was once a pioneer of practical-effects grotesqueries with the likes of Evil Dead II, Raimi has spent the last decade cranking out abominable digital sludge—see the entirety of Oz the Great and Powerful, or large swathes of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. His decision to render so many of the gnarlier visual gags in CGI drags down both the pacing and the tone and strips the filmmaker of one of his greatest assets. It’s not just a stylistic gripe, it actually dulls the impact. He used to have such a fierce command of tone, and you can feel it slipping in those moments when your eye gets pulled toward something glossy and weightless. The weird, tactile joy of his old creations is often nowhere to be found and it stings.

Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien prove to be a pitch perfect pairing. Their antagonistic will-they-won’t-they energy is genuinely off the charts. In any given scene, you don’t know if they’re going to fight, fuck, kill each other, or profess their undying love. McAdams is at the top of her game, clearly having a blast digging into the confidence-porn aspects of Linda, along with her increasingly visible bouts of mania. She’s always a trusted performer, but here she’s so feral and fun it’s a genuine thrill to watch her cut loose. She absolutely kills it. O’Brien is also really good as the love-to-hate-him spoiled executive type who’s never gotten his hands dirty outside of the boardroom. He’s soft, squirrelly, pathetic; all traits perfectly embodied by his snide little staccato laugh.

The script from Damien Shannon and Mark Swift is imperfect. There’s definitely some extra meat on the bones, and with a tighter edit it might have been a little more lean and mean. Still, the way it blends Cast Away with Fatal Attraction makes for something effortlessly watchable, even if not quite transcendent. It’s been a long time since Sam Raimi felt this at ease inside a genre sandbox. And while Send Help doesn’t fully qualify as pure horror—it leans heavily into survival-thriller and psychosexual territory—it’s the closest he’s come to that space since Drag Me to Hell. It may not reach those same intoxicating highs, but there’s something undeniably satisfying about watching Raimi get back to his roots and dirty his hands again.

Send Help ultimately knows how to keep its head above water. As an early-year genre release, it doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it navigates the terrain with enough skill to stay afloat. It’s far from perfect, but with killer performances from Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien, and Raimi’s willingness to get bloody, weird, and a bit unhinged, it ends up feeling like a messy but worthy rescue mission for a usually grim release window.

CONCLUSION: Come get some. Sam Raimi is (mostly) back in the horror business with ‘Send Help’, a campy desert island survival movie about a survivalist employee and her prick boss who get stranded together after a plane crash. Dylan O’Brien is a convincingly smug douche, while Rachel McAdams is electrifying as the dangerously capable femme fatale.