by Charles Kirkland, Jr.
After being the lone survivors of a plane crash, an overlooked and unappreciated employee attempts to prove her worth to her new nepo-baby boss in Send Help.
Despite being promised a long-awaited promotion, hardworking and hyper-competent Linda Liddle is blindsided when her new boss, Bradley Preston, hands the job to his old school friend Donovan instead. Humiliated and furious, she storms into Bradley’s office and demands an explanation, refusing to shrink back into the role of quiet office workhorse. Rather than firing her, Bradley is intrigued by her boldness and invites her to accompany him and Donovan on a business trip, ostensibly to help close a major deal and “show what she can do.”
Mid-flight, however, disaster strikes, and the plane crashes near a remote island, leaving only Linda and an injured Bradley alive. For Linda, the crash becomes a proving ground. If she can keep them alive, surely Bradley will finally recognize her value. Bradley, on the other hand, just wants to be rescued, return to his old life, and reassert control.
Send Help is written by Damion Shannon and Mark Swift and directed by Sam Raimi, framed as his return to the horror genre after seventeen years away from directing it. The film also marks his first collaboration with Columbia since the Spider-Man trilogy, and you can feel him relishing the opportunity to blend slick studio polish with gnarlier genre instincts. The cast includes Rachel McAdams as Linda, Dylan O’Brien as Donovan,
Edyll Ismail, Xavier Samuel, Dennis Haysbert, and Raimi regular Bruce Campbell as Bradley’s father, the company president who initially dangles the promotion in front of Linda. McAdams previously worked with Raimi on Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and her casting here feels like a deliberate step toward becoming part of his recurring ensemble.
McAdams is the film’s biggest asset and, frankly, the primary reason to seek it out. She does not play Linda as a cliché office underdog. Instead, she carefully maps the character’s arc from anxious, over-prepared corporate striver to someone who realizes she is the only truly capable person in the room, or on the island. McAdams moves seamlessly between brittle politeness, simmering resentment, outright rage, and feral, adrenaline-charged intensity as the survival stakes escalate. Her timing with Raimi’s dark humor is sharp, and she grounds even the bloodiest, most outrageous moments with an emotional throughline that feels believable. It is nearly awards-worthy work in a film that is far from awards-worthy, which may explain its release timing.
While the studio marketing leans heavily on calling it a horror film, labeling Send Help strictly as horror undersells what it actually is. It plays more like a psychological thriller soaked in gore, with survival set pieces that are as much about power dynamics as bodily peril. The central conflict is less human versus nature and more a battle over who gets to define reality: Bradley, who assumes authority simply because he is the boss, or Linda, whose competence and resilience steadily wrest control away from him. The film is bleak, twisted, and extremely violent, but beneath the carnage lies a surprisingly pointed examination of workplace politics, gendered expectations, and the ways people justify entitlement.
Rated R for strong, bloody violence and language, Send Help is a brutally entertaining, pitch-black genre piece that doubles as a character study of ambition under pressure. Raimi feels fully at home, weaving nasty, inventive gore with grimly funny beats and steadily escalating tension. With McAdams as his ideal on-screen conduit, he proves he still knows how to balance horror, humor, and character in a way that feels distinctly his. The result is grisly, sharp, and far more fun than it has any right to be, a vicious corporate survival tale that genre fans should not miss.
Send Help opens in theaters January 30, 2026.
Grade: B-
