Halloween Horror Review: Send Help (2026)

For a horror comedy dumped in January, Sam Raimi’s Send Help surprisingly plays with audience sympathy like a more accomplished work. We think that Rachel McAdams’ Linda is surely the protagonist. She’s hard done by and hard working, if awkward. Her boss, Dylan O’Brien’s Bradley, treats her poorly and passes her up for the promotion promised her by his late father. She’s the underdog and he’s the prickish “failson” who got everything handed to him on a silver platter. So when they’re both stranded together on a tropical island after a plane crash, we know her wits (and her fanatical knowledge of Survivor) are their only chance of survival. But is she the hero or the villain? That’s the question that Send Help mines for dramatic tension.

For the first 20 minutes, at least, there’s no question Linda is the hero and Bradley the villain. Bradley takes every opportunity to humiliate her in front of colleagues. Even when she impresses him enough to get him to invite her on a work trip to Bangkok, he gets a hold of her audition tape for Survivor to play for his fellow C-suite douchebags, mocking her awkwardness on camera. So, oh, the delicious irony when the plane crashes and Linda’s Survivor skills are what can keep him from certain death.

Linda knows how to forage, to hunt, to build shelter, and transform the tropical environment into a makeshift camp. Convalescing from a leg injury, Bradley still belittles Linda and treats her as the subordinate. But the situation makes clear that the boss is now the underling, and we’re thrilled by the dramatic reversal which has Bradley finally put in his place. But aside from being an asshole, is Bradley actually a villain? And for all her smarts, is Linda actually a hero?

Raimi and writers Damian Shannon and Mark Swift do well to play with all of Linda’s little insecurities and peculiarities, slowly amplifying them so that we start to second-guess whether she’s actually so sympathetic after all. It helps that the more time we spend with Bradley, the more time we realize he’s mostly a loser masquerading as an alpha—his sob story about his parents, for instance, and his utter dejection at being so bad at survival wears us down with the puppy dog treatment. Linda even accidentally calls him “Sweetie” at one point, which is the name of her pet bird—of course she has a pet bird, Bradley notes. The Freudian slip captures the essence of this character—that he’s helpless like an animal—and accidentally reveals the dynamic between Linda and Bradley, which is not employee and employer or rescuer and rescued, but perhaps closer to owner and pet.

The film effectively plays to McAdams’ talents as a performer in walking this tightrope. She’s good at playing the ordinary girl, personified in her many romcoms, but is also up to the action setpieces. She knows how to push her performance a few clocks past normal so that Linda not only unsettles Bradley, but also begins to unsettle the audience. She’s up to the task, and even relishes the more deranged moments, such as when Linda paralyzes Bradley with an octopus neurotoxin and pretends to castrate him as a show of dominance. To be fair, he had just poisoned her with berries and tried to escape the island on a raft he had built in secret, leaving her to fend for herself.

Send Help keeps us guessing until around this point when we realize the bonding and survival drama is masking the feud between these two self-absorbed people and their villainous motivations. You could argue it keeps us guessing too long, however, as the film has a structural laxness that you won’t find in Raimi’s classic films, such as the Evil Dead trilogy. The film’s opening, for instance, is belaboured, and the pacing is all off until we get to the island. Even then, it takes its sweet time with set-up and survival. I appreciate the procedural detail of how Linda keeps them alive, but the real dramatic meat here is the question of Linda’s motivations and whether we should be rooting for Bradley over Linda. So by the time the film goes full-blown tropical Misery, it’s as much a relief as a surprise.

Raimi balances laughs with jump scares, moments of tension with slapstick comedy, and he truly enlivens the more demented moments, but the camera is shockingly restrained—the Raimi-isms are mostly lacking. Send Help is effective, but it lacks the deranged energy and momentum, both structurally and formally, that I’ve come to expect from Raimi’s works. No wonder that despite its modest success, it was relegated to January and doomed to become one of those minor B-movies you throw on in October, mostly enjoy, but likely forget about when the morning comes.

6 out of 10

Send Help (2026, USA)

Directed by Sam Raimi; written by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift; starring Rachel McAdams, Dylan O’Brien, Edyll Ismail, Xavier Samuel, Chris Pang, Dennis Haysbert.

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