Send Help (2026)
Directed by: Sam Raimi
Premise: A jet crash strands an analyst and her boss (Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien) on a deserted island. She blooms in the wilderness while he is dependent on her to survive.
What Works: Send Help mixes a survivalist adventure, a domestic drama, and a horror picture. That turns out to be a potent combination. Much of the movie is focused on basic survival as Linda and Bradley must find a way to live without the comforts of contemporary civilization. Linda is a student of survivalism; it’s revealed that she is an avid traveler, auditioned for the Survivor television series, and has a masterful level of survivalist knowledge. The filmmakers focus on the details of shelter creation and food prep which give Send Help credibility. Bradley has no practical skills and after suffering a leg injury he is completely dependent on Linda. That power disparity creates a personal tension between the two castaways. Bradley is the snotty son of the company founder and he has just been appointed president. Dylan O’Brien is great at being unselfconsciously awful. Linda is a hardworking but lower-level employee. Bradley’s treatment of Linda makes her inherently sympathetic but Rachel McAdams allows Linda to be dorky and socially awkward which is endearing but also exacerbates her tension with Bradley. Between the survivalism and the interpersonal conflict, Send Help is a lot of fun with humor, action, and psychological manipulation. The inversion of the power relationship is initially satisfying but leads to darker and more interesting places.
What Doesn’t: The quality of the special effects varies. Much of Send Help looks good but some images are obviously computer generated especially the wild boar which looks like a cartoon. The boar hunt sequence is also the most obvious example of the film’s continuity problems. The characters have only one set of clothes and by the end of the hunt Linda is covered in blood. In subsequent scenes her clothes look relatively clean, certainly not blood stained. Those kinds of inconsistencies are seen throughout Send Help. Bradley’s leg is injured in the crash but his disability varies from scene to scene. Filmmaker Sam Raimi is known for his excess and gore but some of those moments come across out of character with the movie’s naturalistic tone. The end of Send Help takes a hard turn. The simmering tension between Linda and Bradley suddenly boils over into over-the-top violence. It’s a little too much. The ending also undercuts what’s working for the movie. The survivalist drama is Send Help’s most compelling aspect and when it strays from that the film becomes less interesting.
Bottom Line: For most of its running time, Send Help is a fun story of survival and adventure. It gets wobbly in the end and some of the filmmaking is inconsistent but this is a highly entertaining picture.
Episode: #1086 (February 8, 2026)