Send Help (2026)

Score: 4.5 / 5

One of the most thoroughly entertaining movies I've seen in long months (maybe in over a year), Send Help is a gift only someone like Sam Raimi could have given us. Uniting one of the most criminally underrated actresses working today (Rachel McAdams, whose reliability is second only to her peerless breadth of work in varying genres and styles) with an appealing young heartthrob (Dylan O'Brien, here making a masterful case for himself as a serious Hollywood leading man), Raimi mashes his own genres with abandon, delivering a wholly original and endlessly riotous adventure thriller with no small amount of horror comedy. 

The main plot concerns McAdams, a corporate strategist whose meek and socially awkward demeanor in her big-time office does not earn her favors. She's like Andy Sachs in The Devil Wears Prada, if Andy had stayed a mousy, tweedy little misfit for several years. Her dapper new boss, O'Brien, is the nepo baby of her old boss, who had promised her a significant promotion; unfortunately, O'Brien is a superficial moron who cares more about golf and suits and healthy lunches than about the people actually working in his company. Think 9 to 5, and McAdams is going to teach this "sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot" a thing or two. Except that she's too busy being sad for herself when her coworkers laugh at her and avoid her smelly sandwiches and ugly clogs and unkempt desk.

But the film references don't end there. Invited on a consequential trip to Bangkok to advise during a major company merger, McAdams reluctantly joins, even as her plane mates viciously mock her. But when the plane spontaneously decompresses and its engines fail, she and her boss are the only survivors, washed up on a deserted shore of some remote Pacific island. With more than small dashes of Cast Away and Triangle of Sadness, Raimi sends us through twists of tone and plot and character that seem calculated to inflict whiplash. Carrying us through is a knowing critique about misogyny in the workplace, milked for its blackly humorous venom at every turn. Her toxic male boss, obsessed with status and the perception of success, desperately clings to the veneer of power he thinks he innately possesses. His foul, serviceable employee blossoms in tropical isolation, revealing her secret hobby of survivalist training, and growing more beautiful even as he breaks down and bleeds out. We're never fully sympathetic with either character; clearly McAdams carries the film, but it's not because she's a Mary Sue. Indeed, more than once Raimi forces us to judge her motives and methods and consider that O'Brien doesn't deserve his fate. This is where the film shifts to Lord of the Flies, or even Misery. 

Yet the screenplay (by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift of the Friday the 13th reboot in 2009), for all its unexpected brilliance, is brought back down to earth by Raimi's insistence on his Raimi-isms. You don't buy a ticket to one of his films without expecting explosive bodily fluids. Fountains of blood, geysers of vomit, rivulets of saliva and snot: it's all coming out, and likely in the dirtiest and most garish ways possible. Their power dynamic is constantly in flux, but so is their ability to survive. Wholly dependent on the flourishing, thriving McAdams is going to damage O'Brien's pride; it doesn't help that he's wounded in body as well as in spirit, so he can't just get up and walk away. They'll share more than just food, shelter, fire, and fluids before all is said and done, though: they'll share secrets. 

I won't spoil any more -- and believe me, it's more than worth it to go into this film blind -- and really, all I've given you is about the first 30 minutes. Send Help goes to strange, dark places, and it's a hell of a trip. Earned scares (I shrieked out loud twice in this film, and was not the only one to do so) lead to meaningful character development, which in turn informs our interpretation of the production. This is exactly what we go to the movies for. This is pure entertainment, artfully imagined and inspiringly realized, showcasing the inimitable talents of several artists at the top of their games.