‘Send Help’ Review: Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien in a Brutal Survival Duel

After a quarter century largely devoted to superhero movies and their endless sequels—along with a couple of big-budget fantasy spectacles—Sam Raimi returns to his roots with this low-budget blend of dark comedy and suspense: two actors, one location (large, but singular), and a story built around psychological pressure rather than spectacle. Send Help recovers what was best, roughest, and occasionally most uncomfortable about the filmmaker behind The Evil Dead in the 1980s and ’90s: tense, character-driven stories that could take the shape of a western, a horror film, an adventure tale, or, as in this case, a survival narrative.

Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) is an employee at a multinational corporation who is routinely overlooked by her superiors and ignored by her coworkers. Exceptionally skilled with numbers and problem-solving, she is awkward at almost everything else: social interaction, personal presentation, even basic eating habits. She lives alone with a small bird and pins her hopes on the arrival of Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien) as the company’s new CEO. Bradley is the founder’s son, and his late father had promised Linda a promotion—one she trusts the son will honor. He does not. Instead, Bradley proves to be an exemplary jerk: he humiliates her openly and mocks her behind her back. Some of his criticisms may be accurate, but the way he delivers them is gratuitously degrading.

Eventually, Bradley makes her an offer: accompany him to the Bangkok office, where she might prove herself worthy of a management position. But the private jet they are traveling on—along with a group of Bradley’s equally unpleasant executive friends—malfunctions mid-flight. After a violent crash in which everyone scrambles to save themselves, Linda ends up stranded on a deserted island. Soon she discovers that Bradley has survived as well, badly injured. And this is where the power dynamic shifts—not only because of his physical limitations, but because Linda, a devoted fan of Survivor who has spent years training for precisely these kinds of situations, actually knows how to take care of herself. Bradley, meanwhile, is completely useless.

This reversal becomes the film’s central theme and narrative engine. Send Help traces the uneasy alliances and confrontations between the two as time passes on the island. Linda, who is capable and self-sufficient, has little desire to return to civilization, while Bradley—panicked and disoriented—desperately wants to reclaim his former life of comfort and authority. Circumstances force him to depend on her, but tensions inevitably mount. Before long, survival is no longer just about withstanding the island—its storms, winds, and wild animals—but about surviving each other.

Armed with his familiar visual toolkit—rapid zooms, striking camera angles, restless movement—Raimi sustains a constant sense of tension, present both in dialogue and in the island’s escalating dangers: potentially poisonous fruit, animal attacks, and other threats that emerge as physical and psychological exhaustion set in. The transfer of power takes its toll in another way as well, gradually drawing out the worst in both characters.

It is in this territory—most fully explored in the film’s second half—that Send Help begins to lose some focus, drifting toward a structure reminiscent of Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness, both in its narrative turns and in the cruelty unleashed between the protagonists. While Raimi frames these developments as a critique of how power distorts the human mind, there comes a pivotal moment when the film abandons its own internal logic. From that point on, the emphasis shifts from psychological plausibility to sheer impact, privileging action over the grounded character work the script had sustained until then.

Despite early appearances—given how relentlessly Linda is mistreated—the film is not primarily a critique of billionaire cruelty or the emptiness of their sycophants. Instead, it examines the logic of power itself and the behaviors it can produce, regardless of class or economic status. Pessimistic and biting, violent yet undeniably entertaining, Send Help functions as a kind of metaphorical capsule for the “every man for himself” ethos of the contemporary world. For Raimi, it also represents a reboot of sorts—a return to form. The catch, perhaps, is that what once played as cynical, absurdist black comedy in the ’90s now feels uncomfortably close to reality.