Send Help announces itself as a survival thriller, but Sam Raimi’s latest is something far more subversive: a darkly comic, psychologically barbed dismantling of corporate masculinity and the systems that enable it. What begins as a familiar plane-crash setup quickly mutates into an unsettling power study, one that weaponizes genre expectations against the audience with wicked glee.
At the center of the film are two opposing worldviews: Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams), an overlooked strategy executive whose competence has long been eclipsed by her social awkwardness, and Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien), a charming-ish nepotism hire whose authority rests on performance rather than substance. When their corporate flight malfunctions mid-air and crashes off the scenic coasts of Thailand, the two find themselves stranded together, abruptly severed from the titles and office hierarchies that once defined their relationship. Stripped of optics, privilege, and institutional protection, the environment becomes an unforgiving equalizer – one that quickly reveals who actually possesses the knowledge, discipline, and instincts required to endure, and who has merely been performing power all along.
Raimi stages this reversal with surgical precision. In the corporate world, Bradley’s casual cruelty – mocking Linda’s habits, sidelining her work, repulsed by her mere presence – is normalized, even rewarded. On the island, that same entitlement becomes not just useless, but dangerous. Linda’s once-derided survivalist hobbies, her encyclopedic knowledge of TV’s Survivor, and her quiet preparedness are suddenly essential. Competence, not charisma, becomes currency.
McAdams delivers one of the most daring performances of her career here. Her Linda is not a sanitized victim nor a righteous avenger; she is a deeply human anti-hero whose empowerment curdles into something more unsettling. Raimi and writers Damian Shannon and Mark Swift (Freddy vs. Jason, Baywatch) wisely refuse to frame her arc as a simple liberation fantasy. Instead, Send Help asks a more uncomfortable question: what happens when a woman who has been systematically minimized finally gains control – and realizes she enjoys it?
This is where the film’s feminist edge sharpens. Linda’s transformation is exhilarating, but also disquieting. Her moral compass begins to warp as survival instincts fuse with years of suppressed resentment. Raimi never excuses her choices, but he insists we understand them. The result is a rare female anti-hero whose darkness is allowed to exist without apology or narrative punishment.
Opposite her, O’Brien’s Bradley is a masterclass in toxic masculinity rendered absurd. He is not a monster in the traditional sense; he is worse – a man buoyed by systems that mistake confidence for capability. O’Brien plays him as superficially charming, perpetually aggrieved, and utterly unprepared for a world that no longer props him up. As the island erodes his authority, his fragility is exposed in increasingly humiliating ways. His desperation to reclaim dominance becomes both pathetic and dangerous, a commentary on how masculinity trained to command reacts when stripped of power.
Raimi’s tonal balancing act – equal parts thriller, horror, and jet-black comedy – is one of the film’s greatest strengths. The violence is messy, the humor cruel, the suspense relentless. A feral, sibling-like fight between Linda and Bradley is staged not as spectacle, but as an eruption of long-suppressed rage, choreographed with brutal intimacy. The laughter it provokes is nervous, the kind that catches in your throat.
Crucially, Send Help grounds its extremity in realism. Survival expert Ky Furneaux’s influence is felt in every detail, from water collection to shelter building, lending authenticity that makes the psychological unraveling hit harder. This is not survival as cinematic shorthand; it is labor, discomfort, and exhaustion. The realism denies the audience any comforting distance, forcing us to confront how thin the veneer of civilization truly is.
Visually, Raimi and cinematographer Bill Pope (who has collaborated on previous Raimi efforts Darkman, Spider-Man 2 and Spider-Man 3) use the island as a living antagonist. Sun-blasted beaches and sheer cliffs are rendered with tactile immediacy, while Danny Elfman’s score slyly mirrors Linda’s evolution – its once-innocent motifs growing increasingly sinister. Elfman understands the assignment perfectly: the music seduces before it unsettles.
What makes Send Help resonate beyond its genre trappings is its refusal to offer easy moral alignment. The film attacks toxic masculinity not through didactic dialogue, but through exposure – by showing how hollow authority collapses when divorced from actual skill or empathy. At the same time, it resists turning Linda into a simple emblem of empowerment. Power, Raimi suggests, does not purify; it reveals.
By the time the film reaches its chaotic final act, audience sympathies have been flipped, challenged, and flipped again. Raimi dares viewers to sit with that discomfort, to question who we root for and why. In doing so, Send Help becomes less a survival thriller than a survival satire – one that understands the true horror is not being stranded on an island, but being trapped in systems that decide who matters.
Bold, unsettling, and wickedly funny, Send Help stands as one of Raimi’s most provocative works in years. It’s a film that fortifies genre to interrogate power, gender, and entitlement – and leaves the audience laughing, squirming, and questioning their own instincts long after the credits roll.
FOUR STARS (OUT OF FIVE)
Send Help is screening in Australian theatres from January 29th, 2026, before opening in the United States on January 30th.
