Send Help (2026)
Sam Raimi spent the better part of a decade inside the Marvel machine, and frankly, it showed. So when Send Help landed on the slate, there was a reasonable question worth asking: had something of the old Raimi survived the experience? The answer, I’m pleased to report, is yes. More than survived, actually. This is a film that feels like a man remembering what he actually enjoys doing, and enjoying it with considerable gusto.
The setup is almost absurdly contained. Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams), a meek corporate worker who was promised a promotion by her retiring boss, discovers that his son and new CEO, Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien), has other plans entirely. Plans involving a dead-end transfer and, presumably, a firm handshake goodbye. When fate deposits both of them on a remote island in the Gulf of Thailand following a plane crash, the only survivors, everything Linda has endured in the fluorescent-lit corridors of corporate life gets stripped back to its raw, uncomfortable foundations. What is authority, after all, when there is no office to enforce it?
Rachel McAdams is the reason this film works. Full stop. She navigates Linda’s transformation with a precision that refuses to tip into caricature, finding the fury and the fragility in equal measure. Dylan O’Brien holds his own as Bradley, a man who is less a villain than a particularly unfortunate product of his circumstances, and there are flashes of genuine depth beneath the bluster that earn him more sympathy than the script perhaps intends. Together, they generate a friction that keeps the screen genuinely alive.
Raimi directs with the kind of physical energy you suspect he missed dearly during his superhero years. The island cinematography is gorgeous in a way that feels almost confrontational, all golden light and lush greenery pressing against the increasingly grotesque events taking place within it. Danny Elfman’s score does exactly what good horror scoring does: it makes you uneasy about things you cannot quite identify.
Not everything lands, mind you. A handful of the more extreme sequences push past provocation into something closer to self-indulgence, and the screenplay occasionally tips its hand too openly, spelling out its satirical commentary in ways that underestimate the audience. The third act, in my opinion, loses some of its footing as spectacle overtakes story. These are real weaknesses, not trivial ones.
But Send Help is, at its core, a film that refuses the easy path. It is not content to be a simple survival thriller, nor does it settle for being a workplace comedy with a change of scenery. It occupies an uncomfortable middle ground, a space where a laugh can arrive half a second after a wince, and that discomfort is not accidental. It is, I think, precisely the point. Raimi understands that satire lands hardest when it is uncomfortable to watch, and he leans into that understanding without flinching.
Not his best work. But a confident, entertaining return to what made him worth paying attention to in the first place.