Jonah Naplan   January 30, 2026

Sam Raimi became the king of genre cinema several decades ago when his “Evil Dead” movies arguably made a name for body horror in the industry and his Tobey Maguire-starring “Spider-Man” trilogy put superhero blockbusters on the map as real, professional films, not just commercial products. He returns to his R-rated roots with the power play “Send Help,” an inspired fusion of “Cast Away” and “Triangle of Sadness” that sets itself up with promise but slowly fizzles out as it moves along, repeating the same themes louder and louder, rather than playing with the subtle, nuanced ways that power dynamics can shift in the face of danger, whether its two subjects realize it or not. It’s also just not nearly gnarly or fun enough for a Raimi movie, which is kind of puzzling considering how the director easily should have eaten this material up, but even he needed to be afforded a little extra help.

The players are Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams), whose hard work in the Planning & Strategy department of her cubicle-filled corporate office (it’s sort of unclear what they do specifically, beyond discussing quarterly numbers and statistics) has gone largely unappreciated among her obnoxious male colleagues, and her chauvinistic new boss Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien), who passed her up for the promotion she was promised by his father who recently died (a keen eye will spot it’s actually Raimi favorite Bruce Campbell in the portrait in the background). When Bradley calls the low-spirited Linda into his office one day, he reveals that although he still thinks she’s “not ready” for such power, he’d like to invite her on his private plane to Bangkok where the company will be doing important business. When the plane gets caught in a storm and crashes into the ocean, only Linda and Bradley are left alive, stranded on a deserted island with no other people in sight.

Of course, Linda turns out to be a total survival nut, and knows exactly how to find clean water and food, build shelter, and start a fire and can keep both of them alive—so long as she’s willing to help her patronizing boss. Even after she’s constructed a canopy, caught fish, and tended to his wounds—all before he wakes up—Bradley is keen to remind Linda that he’s still her boss and she’s still his employee. The whole object of “Send Help,” though, is how the tables will soon begin to turn, and before long the power dynamics switch. You know this because the characters tell us the power dynamics have switched. Then they tell us again. And they keep telling us the whole movie. The bluntness of the messaging doesn’t make the ride more enjoyable; on the contrary, it slows it down, and makes for an incredibly boring second act that’s largely bereft of the spice promised by the concept. It immediately makes “Send Help” an early contender for the most unsubtle movie of the year.

Of course, Raimi has a knack for developing an unsettling intimacy between actors, toying with closeness as a gross-out device. In classic Raimi fashion, the camera really zooms in, highlighting every inch of the human face in startling detail with his signature sight gag. In the standout moments where this horror legend really goes for the gold, the talented McAdams and O’Brien are game for anything. But those moments are way too few and far between, especially for a movie from this director. Even the film’s gnarliest moment is ultimately a fake-out, while the sporadic bursts of cartoonish carnage throughout leave us aching for something more.

The concept of a movie about two hotheads going at each other, messing around with who’s in charge, quipping, one-upping, and exploiting, is bound to have some layer of unlikeability among the characters. You can’t really root for either of them in “Send Help,” which even manages to push the modest Linda into immoral territory once the powder keg reaches a fine boil. But this becomes a real problem once they start confiding in one another, confessing their greatest regrets and life stories, and we can’t find it in ourselves to care at all. When they violently face-off in the third act, it’s just one big bad taking down another, and it makes no difference to us who wins.

McAdams will probably be superior over O’Brien when it comes to praise for “Send Help,” because she’s doing the kind of “elevated acting” that horror junkies eat up. Yet I couldn’t help but think that her performance was based on the misconception that louder equals better. She’s really giving it her all here, both in her characterization of the frumpy woman at the beginning of the story, and the no-nonsense badass she becomes at the end, but just like the messaging central to the movie, she’s telegraphing exactly what she is to us, pushing hard into the archetype, so that when it suddenly shifts, nobody could mistake it as being the same. Writers Damian Shannon and Mark Swift have forgotten the gray area, that transition period in between that shows change is being made, perhaps in response to the condescensions of her boss. But it’s either one or the other for her.

On the other hand, O’Brien, as you find out, basically stays the same for the whole movie, and he really gets the opportunity here to act with his eyes as much as this character would with his mouth. But even then, there’s a sense that the filmmakers’ desperation to feign from showing any of his humanity is merely just a device to help hammer home its prey-eats-predator mentality. Considering how blunt the film is about everything else, one might wonder why the expected carnage, which should have been the highlight of the movie, isn’t similarly relentless, ultimately making “Send Help” a major disappointment.

If you want to watch a great movie that explores these same power dynamic themes in a much more subtle and effective way, I’d highly recommend checking out Paul Thomas Anderson’s mesmerizing “Phantom Thread,” which finds action in the dialogue between its principal subjects, and the way that master and servant interact with each other. Some will claim “Send Help” does this, too, but I personally wish that the movie didn’t help us so often and just let go of our hand.

Now playing in theaters.