Send Help
A woman and her overbearing boss become stranded on a deserted island after a plane crash. They must overcome past grievances and work together to survive, but ultimately, it’s a battle of wills and wits to make it out alive.
Release date: 30 January 2026
Director: Sam Raimi
Screenplay: Mark Swift, Damian Shannon
Sam Raimi’s career can be best described as controlled chaos. He’s the auteur who swung from the splatstick horror of The Evil Dead to the soaring heights of Spider-Man, defining genres with a mischievous grin. His true signature, however, is a horror-comedy brew of dynamic camera work, slapstick violence, and dark humour, a gleefully sadistic cocktail that earns jumps and laughs in equal measure. This is the legacy of a director who admits to being terrified by the very gore he unleashes, a “coward bully” who loves nothing more than the audience’s reaction.
This playful sadism finds a perfect outlet in cinema’s grand tradition of the absolutely terrible boss. Rachel McAdams stars as Linda, an overlooked employee, and Dylan O’Brien is her insufferable new boss, Bradley. When their plane crashes, stranding them on an island, the power dynamics of the corporate world get a savage, sunburnt rewrite. Linda, a die-hard Survivor fan, suddenly holds all the cards. And maybe a spear.
Which brings us to Bradley, and the grand, cinematic tradition of the absolutely terrible boss. He fits right in with the icons. He’s got the smug entitlement of Bill Lumbergh from Office Space, asking you to come in on Sunday with a vacant “yeah”. He possesses the nepo-baby arrogance that would make Miranda Priestly from The Devil Wears Prada raise a single eyebrow in judgment. He’s a Gordon Gekko for the frat-bro set, believing greed is good but maybe also that a killer beer pong record is a resume highlight.
We’ve been captivated by these monsters for decades because they tap into a universal, simmering frustration. A staggering 82% of American workers say they’d quit because of a bad manager. Cinema and TV let us live out the catharsis we dream about in our cubicles. We watch the secretaries in *9 to 5* kidnap their sexist boss, or the assistants in Horrible Bosses plot elaborate revenge. Send Help is the latest, and perhaps gooiest, entry in this canon of workplace wish-fulfilment. It’s a film that understands the primal scream buried in every pointless meeting and stolen credit.
For a look at how Raimi’s unique legacy and this tradition collide in his latest work, read the full review of Send Help from George Wolfington.
Send Help Review: Sam Raimi’s Splatstick Return is a Cathartic Revenge on Terrible Bosses
A Horror Movie Review by George Wolf
As much as Send Help feels like the Sam Raimi film that it is, the writing credits seem a bit unfinished. With a premise taken more from Triangle of Sadness than Castaway, and two pivotal plot points lifted from films I won’t mention for fear of spoilers, you’d expect at least an inspired by or story elements citation of the previous works.
No? Alrighty then. Raimi works from a script by the team of Damian Shannon and Mark Swift (Baywatch, 2009’s Friday the 13th, Freddy vs. Jason), providing the requisite dark humor, blood splatter and body fluids for a fun, root-for-the-underdog romp.
Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) is that underdog. Linda puts in long, committed hours in the strategy and planning department of a big firm. She’d been promised a major promotion from the founder (nice Bruce Campbell portrait on the wall!), but now he’s passed on and the d-bag son Bradley (Dylan O’Brien) has taken over.
And Bradley’s gonna give Linda’s promotion to his frat buddy instead.
Linda sticks up for herself, so Bradley gives her the chance to prove her worth at a big merger meeting in Bangkok. But when their plane crashes, Linda and Bradley end up as the only ones left alive on a deserted island. And right away, Linda’s skills are very valuable indeed.
Turns out, she’s a survivalist junkie who has auditioned for Survivor. Linda knows her way around the dangers of an uninhabited locale, while Bradley doesn’t know much beyond silver spoon-fed privilege. So Linda will not take kindly to being ordered around like the under-appreciated underling she was back in the office.
Bradley eventually becomes contrite, but can he be trusted? Linda appears ever helpful, but can she be trusted? Their castaway days become an increasingly bloody game of cat, mouse and wild boar, with some wonderfully competitive chemistry between McAdams and O’Brien.
She makes Linda’s transition to alpha female a crowd-pleasing hoot, and he crafts Bradley with a perfectly obnoxious mix of misguided mansplainer and smug elitist.
Yes, it’s over the top, just like you expect a Sam Raimi deserted island playground to be. What an unspoiled canvas for some blood spray, projectile vomiting, and a little survival of the deadliest. Game on!
Send Help delivers the R-rated fun, and it’s instantly relatable to the countless souls who’ve secretly dreamed of doing bodily harm to an insufferable boss. But it’s a comeuppance fantasy that still remains easily forgettable…unless you’ve seen the couple films it repeatedly recalls.
Then we’ll have something to talk about.
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