OVERVIEW
Send Help (2026) is a nasty, wacky mix of comedy, survival thriller, and occasional horror from Sam Raimi. Linda Liddle has spent her work life being treated like she is invisible, until a plane crash leaves her stranded with only one other survivor: her young boss, Bradley Preston, the newly appointed CEO. With nobody else around and no workplace rules left to hide behind, the power dynamic flips fast, and he is suddenly at her mercy.
BACKGROUND
This marks the second time Raimi has circled back to his dark, mean-spirited side after spending time in big studio territory. He did it in 2009, following his Spider-Man trilogy with the intentionally ridiculous, gross-out Drag Me to Hell. Now he follows Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness with a genre mash-up that feels unusually unruly for a major studio release. It honestly made me wonder if the superhero gigs, at this point, are the price of admission for getting these weirder movies green-lit with real money behind them.
EXECUTION
The result is a film undeniably Raimi, inviting all his collaborators along for the ride in an almost clean summary of his career instincts. You can feel the scrappy, visual playfulness that goes back to the original Evil Dead. You get the gleefully disgusting horror that recalls Drag Me to Hell. And you also get moments of bigger-budget spectacle that resemble his superhero work, at least in how he stages conflict and pushes momentum. He is not breaking new ground here or trying to reinvent himself, but he is clearly having fun and begging you to have fun with him.
It might not work for some, but for me, it was a messy blast. Raimi keeps switching lanes, and the pace rarely slows down enough for you to settle into one tone. That means the transitions can be bumpy, and some character choices are impossible to buy, especially with Linda, who starts the film as a completely different person than the one we get for most of it. The movie basically dares you to stop overthinking it. If you accept that dare, it rewards you with a steady stream of “I cannot believe this is in the movie” moments.
There are plenty of individual scenes that delight, and the best ones are when the film throws something you would never expect to see in a Rachel McAdams-led movie, like an eye popping out of a boar, sudden scares, or, like in Drag Me to Hell, a lot of vomit.
The McAdams versus Dylan O’Brien conflict drives the film, and seeing the dynamic shift constantly is very enjoyable. McAdams is having a blast crafting a character that you’re loving at a moment and loving to hate in the other. The most unhinged she has ever been since Mean Girls. O’Brien is not quite on the same level, and he can feel a little off in villainous mode. Similar to his recent Anniversary performance, you can see at times that he is trying too hard to sound mean, and I kept thinking Alden Ehrenreich might have been a better choice for this exact kind of slippery, charming antagonism. But even when he distracts, the amount of surprises the script throws at the two of them makes each second engrossing, with you always wondering what could possibly happen next.
AFTERTASTE
It is not the most accomplished or memorable work from Raimi or his collaborators (Danny Elfman’s score, in particular, feels very anonymous), but the movie delivers a big pile of surprises and laughs and is a rare studio with the confidence to be nasty, silly, and gross at the same time. I just hope it doesn’t take another detour into more superhero films for Raimi to give us more of that.