Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) is a minor mess. She’s clearly beyond capable at her job as an accountant—or rather, as she repeatedly clarifies, part of the Strategy And Planning department at a consulting firm where various execu-bros think of everyone they don’t golf with as some variation on their secretary. But she wears unfashionable shoes and unflattering sweaters. She makes chummy work jokes that already aren’t funny before stumbling over her stage-whisper delivery. She brings her lunch from home, and when a bit of tuna fish gets stuck just below her lip before intercepting her new boss Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien) for a quick bit of self-promotion, it’s not just a casual character note. The camera goes in ultra-close on her mouth, capturing the grotesquerie, and equally close in on Bradley’s eyes, alight with horror at the sight of a somewhat older woman who hasn’t dolled herself up for him. That’s the Sam Raimi touch, baby.
So too, of course, is a jump-scare hallucination of a ghoulish figure. So is a hand jutting out from the earth. And so are the soakings of blood and other fluids in Send Help, Raimi’s first R-rated movie in a quarter-century. But those hallmarks come later. The extreme close-ups are just the warning shots, the signs that Raimi is back and ready to mess around. Send Help is his messiest such mess-around since Drag Me To Hell (which somehow squeaked by with a PG-13), and at times feels like a less supernatural companion piece to the most socially conscious of his pure horror films.
Both movies’ heroines are bedeviled by their desire to climb the corporate ladder, and the rigged demands placed upon them by their imposing male bosses. Bradley, son of the old boss who promised Linda a substantial promotion, is especially enervating in that regard; we see him behind closed doors (despite his “open-door policy”) blithely telling a subordinate that he’ll instead hand Linda’s promotion to one of his bros, and ship her out of the main office, to boot. (He really doesn’t like tuna. Or, we can infer, women he’s not attracted to.) To placate her, he offers more rigged gamesmanship: She can join a corporate trip overseas, help out with crunching numbers, and then wait to be told that, somehow, it simply wasn’t enough.
Instead, their plane crashes into the ocean, in a short sequence staged much as you might expect Sam Raimi to stage a plane crash where most of the victims have been painted as wholly unsympathetic: a slapstick midair torture chamber. Linda and Bradly wash ashore on an unknown island, Linda saves her injured boss’s life, and the balance of power between them begins to shift.
Bradley requires some direct instruction about this change. O’Brien plays him as a bro version of a Raimi boob complete with Looney Tunes grunts and growls of frustration that would make his spiritual (and, via one brief photograph, on-screen) father Bruce Campbell proud, and Bradley’s first instinct is to keep treating Linda as an underling. As such, he continues issuing the kind of asinine non-suggestion directives (like explaining that Linda should build a larger fire) that anyone who has ever held a corporate office job will recognize as typical orders from on high. Linda, who happens to be obsessed with Survivor, lands on this island with surprisingly vast knowledge about obtaining water, food, and shelter. As with her job, she’s done the homework; unlike her job, the satisfaction of this work gives her an extra glow. Her hair even flowers into island curls. The movie follows the multitude of tensions that develop as the pair spends more time together without rescue, nursing conflicting ideas about how to handle their predicament.
To explain further would risk spoiling the movie’s give and take—though what’s genuinely unpredictable about Send Help isn’t the literal plotting, where several turns, however satisfying, are obviously telegraphed. No, Raimi and the screenwriters instead keep the audience off-balance by getting playfully coy about who or what we should be rooting for in this situation. Linda is the more obviously sympathetic party, but as fun as it is to see her take charge—to see McAdams literally go ham by hunting a fearsome wild boar—Raimi has thornier gender politics than will allow an uncomplicated dose of Good For Her cinema. Early on, he’s unsparing about depicting Linda as an awkward dork, even going so far as to give her a barely-sublimated attraction to her handsome, younger boss. When Bradly ungratefully accuses her of playing “homemaker” on the beach, he’s being deeply condescending, and the movie knows this. Yet there’s a growing sense that the filmmakers don’t entirely disagree, either.
So alongside Linda’s old-fashioned and thwarted idea that simply working with dedication and skill at her job will result in her ultimate reward, the movie plants an even-older-fashioned hint that she might well enjoy serving as some ’60s-style combination of coworker, subordinate, and domestic partner. On the island, she can become the Work Wife who won’t be ignored. Drag Me To Hell saw fit to specifically and moralistically punish a young woman for giving in to the demands of capitalism, by unleashing a wronged hag upon her; in this case, the potentially compromised heroine threatens to turn into that classic blood-soaked, Raimi-approved shrieking hag herself. Both movies depict men behaving in a venal and immoral fashion, nonetheless overshadowed by (or at least in competition with) the unladylike transgressions of women’s base designs. It seems possible that Raimi’s view of womanhood—damsel in distress, evil hag, or hag in distress—may be somewhat limited.
As with Drag, this doesn’t ruin the fun. If anything, it gives the movie an exploitation-friendly edge that many contemporary thrillers are far too self-congratulatory to even consider. Besides the fact that Send Help doesn’t attempt anything as simple as a single, gendered sympathy flip, putting McAdams in the lead role changes the potentially regressive calculus of Linda Liddle. McAdams and O’Brien both give performances that could be described as interestingly caricatured while still managing to find a surprising emotional range from scene to scene. That’s especially true of McAdams, who locates genuine hurt and anguish whenever Linda seems ready to heel-turn, and also breaks bad with abandon when required. Linda becomes an indelible and complicated character in a way that the lead of Drag Me To Hell never quite achieves.
Send Help doesn’t merge Raimi’s fever-pitch flourishes with human frailties, whether dramatic or comic, quite so well as Spider-Man 2 or Army Of Darkness. It’s also not as wild a mayhem machine as some of his earlier genre workouts. As only his second non-IP movie since the original Spider-Man, it’s actually a reminder of how relatively few horror thrillers he’s made with this kind of semi-realistic grounding (that nonetheless doesn’t prevent the camera from careening around the sometimes soundstage-like environment when called upon). As much as some of the imagery feels like Raimi playing the hits, Send Help also suggests a later-career shift for the filmmaker, one where his comic-book throwbacks run into (or over?) contemporary obstacles without losing their go-for-broke loopiness. It can get messy. Good for him.
Director: Sam Raimi
Writers: Damian Shannon, Mark Swift
Starring: Rachel McAdams, Dylan O’Brien
Release Date: January 30, 2026
Keep scrolling for more great stories.