Send Help Is a Nasty Bit of Fun

It’s tempting to describe Send Help in a quick little line, something like: “Sam Raimi’s Greatest Cinematic Hits: Deserted Island Edition.” That’s not an inaccurate description, but doesn’t fully portray the joy of watching Raimi play in a subgenre new to his career with his signature gags. You will see someone puke on another person’s face like in Drag Me To Hell, but the context is wildly different when you’re no longer operating in Raimi's usual supernatural space. Instead of blood exploding onto Bruce Campbell’s face from a shredded deadite in an Evil Dead movie, Rachel McAdams’ bloodied face comes from hunting a boar with a hand-carved spear. Even if you’re unfamiliar with Raimi’s previous decades of work and how his recurring gags appear in nearly every movie he makes, Send Help is a nasty bit of fun.

Send Help sits firmly in the “stranded on a deserted island” subgenre, though that covers a massive range of tones from the recent satire Triangle of Sadness to the World War II tale Hell in the Pacific. Send Help skews more towards the haves-and-have-nots satire of Triangle of Sadness, but does so through an R-rated Looney Tunes lens focused on Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien swinging for the fences as performers. The end result is a bunch of fun, but with some notable caveats.

Send Help, thankfully, speeds through its setup to get to the deserted island shenanigans. Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) has worked a soulless corporate job for seven years, living on a meager salary with a pet bird and dreams of competing on Survivor. Her previous boss promised her a promotion to vice president, but after he dies and his son, Bradley Preston (Dylan O'Brien) takes over the company, that promise never materializes. However, Bradley is convinced to keep Linda at the company long enough to complete a deal in Bangkok due to her exceptional number-crunching abilities. When Linda, Bradley and a crew of corporate stereotypes head to Bangkok on a private jet, the plane crashes—leaving Linda and an injured Bradley as the only survivors on a deserted island. Linda’s obsession with Survivor proves incredibly helpful for keeping her and Bradley alive, but Linda enjoys life on the island much more than Bradley. Linda knows damn well that she’s the boss of the island, and she intends to make sure that Bradley understands that, no matter the cost.

One of the best decisions Send Help makes is spending as little time as possible on its corporate intrigue. It’s the least interesting part of the plot, and it’s also the least visually interesting portion of the film. Raimi, alongside his longtime cinematographer Bill Pope, lets the camera leap to life on the deserted island, from manic handheld longtakes to extreme close-ups. Unfortunately, Pope’s energetic camerawork can’t quite make up for some iffy digital effects, though this problem hardly dominates the film. Raimi has also brought along one of his best collaborators for Send Help, editor Bob Murawski. There are some hilarious sequences built on the back of Murawski’s editing with an early contender for 2026’s best match-cut.

What really allows Send Help to go the distance is the absolute commitment from Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien. While there are other notable performers in the movie, most of Send Help centers on McAdams and O’Brien. O’Brien easily plays a corporate douchebag humbled by fear, but McAdams is the undeniable best part of Send Help. Linda Liddle is a wild character, constantly transforming and contorting from scene to scene, and McAdams makes this living cartoon feel startlingly real. A mid-film monologue that deepens her character could have seemed like a borderline parody of a tragic backstory in the wrong hands, but McAdams manages to keep a handle on Linda no matter what the movie asks of her. Somehow, a quiet and socially awkward office worker with bits of a tuna sandwich smeared on her face evolves into a menacing survivalist without ever feeling like a stretch.

With a runtime of nearly two hours, Send Help does threaten to go off of the rails in order to sustain its length. The best way it manages to fill that time is by creating a vicious dynamic between the characters of Linda and Bradley. Linda is obviously a more sympathetic character than Bradley due to her position in life on the mainland, but Send Help makes the bold choice of taking her character to crueler places. A hackier movie would try and make Bradley suddenly become a better guy as a counterpoint to Linda’s dark descent, but Send Help constantly reiterates that no matter what Bradley says about trying to be better, he’s a corporate piece of shit through and through. As Linda and Bradley match wits psychologically and physically, it becomes a tug of war over who you feel worse for from scene to scene.

But Send Help starts to falter when it retreats into a few tired cliches, both in terms of plot and style. While trying to build twists into the story, Raimi uses plot points predictable to anyone familiar with a typical deserted island movie. While some of Raimi’s signatures translate into surprising ways within the deserted island sub-genre, others are crowbarred into the movie in outright obnoxious ways. As much fun as Raimi’s jumpscares can be in his horror movies and non-horror movies, most of them fall flat in Send Help. The first one is amusing as a fan of Raimi’s work, but the rest are contrived to an eye-rolling degree.

This complaint is slightly paradoxical in the sense that it’s easy to imagine some mid-tier director receiving this script and bringing no personality to the proceedings that would make this story stand out. Although Raimi’s signatures make this film distinct from other movies with the sub-genre and a romp for the most part, his signatures also call attention to themselves in ways that barely serve Send Help’s greatest strengths.

It is doubtful that Send Help will be remembered as one of Raimi’s greatest films. This is a director who has at least two movies that can be considered foundational to their genres (Evil Dead II for horror-comedies and Spider-Man for comic-book movies) and a massive roster of deliriously entertaining films across a variety of genres. It’s hard to beat Raimi even when you’re Raimi himself, but that doesn’t mean that Send Help isn’t going to be a blast to watch in a theater with a crowd squealing at its bleakly hilarious sequences. Anyone who will have a great time watching Rachel McAdams smile like a demon after dropping a boar’s head in front of a terrified Dylan O’Brien is in for a wonderful ride.

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