Send Help review (2026)

May 20, 2026 Jeffrey Lyles Dennis Haysbert, Dylan O'Brien, Edyll Ismail, Rachel McAdams, Sam Raimi, Send Help, Thaneth Warakulnukroh

Send Help comes tantalizingly close to making good on its dark premise but the filmmakers can’t manage to get out of their own way leading to a gory and unearned conclusion.

Linda (Rachel McAdams, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness) has been toiling away at a company for years. While she’s highly competent and good at her job, Linda is that annoying obnoxious co-worker no one wants to be around for more than 5 minutes.

Just as obnoxious though in a totally different manner is her new boss, Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien, Love and Monsters). Bradley is a typical boorish billionaire bro who’s gotten used to people leaping when he says jump and is even more intolerable now that he’s taken over his late father’s company. He’s got an impossibly gorgeous fiancé (Edyll Ismail) yet still is quick to sexually harass potential new employees.

Although Bradley’s father promised Linda a big promotion, Bradley isn’t keen on making her a VP due to her quirky behavior. Send Help screenwriting partners Damian Shannon and Mark Swift (Baywatch, Freddy vs. Jason) make Linda and Bradley caricatures of the mousy, nerdy office workhorse and the bratty boss tropes but they’re written so over the top that they come off too cartoonish to be actual people.

While the script does evolve in some areas, Send Help is weighed down by that pesky problem that both characters are too deep shades of grey to be likable. This is further highlighted when Bradley and Linda are the only survivors of a violent plane crash.

Director Sam Raimi makes sure that the crash sequence gets a horror coating to it with blood coating the plane’s exterior and a zombie-coded burn victim. No need to worry, Raimi does toss in an actual zombie scene to slash it off his checklist.

With no friends and a bird for a roommate, Linda grew obsessed with Survivor and even submitted an audition tape to join the show. Linda is written far too silly. When Bradley ends up on shore with a badly damaged leg it falls on Linda to take care of both of them. If Shannon and Swift toned down some of the corny humor, she would be a character easy to root for in this role reversal power play. As is, Linda nearly shifts to a noticeably different character when she’s on the island.

At its core, Send Help is a constantly shifting struggle for power. With a deeper film it could be viewed as an intriguing metaphor of men and women in the corporate boardroom. Send Help doesn’t have those kinds of lofty aspirations or if the filmmakers did, they failed to make it work.

Their failure doesn’t carry over to McAdams or O’Brien’s performance. They both deliver amazing turns fully capable of handling the shifting dynamics of boss/employee to survivalist/hapless sidekick to potentially friends. Given that Send Help is largely a two-person film besides a far too quick cameo by Dennis Haysbert, their chemistry was vital and they prop the film up through some of the weaker scenes.

There are some good moments like Linda having enough of Bradley’s demanding attitude despite being fully dependent on her for survival. In arguably the film’s best scene, Linda and Bradley discuss their past relationships and upbringing like real people worth caring about. For the sake of the film, it can’t last but it offered insight on deeper character potential if the writers sought a more thoughtful approach.

As the film nears its conclusion, both characters make disappointing decisions that squanders some goodwill. One of their choices is so heinous, it should negate a happy ending for them.

Raimi loves to go fully indulgent on gross out dark humor so Send Help has an abundance of body fluid whether in the form of blood, spittle, mucus and naturally projectile vomiting. There’s even a scene involving an eyeball sure to make viewers particularly squeamish.

At just shy of two hours, Send Help overextends its welcome resulting in some scenes that could have been edited down or just cut altogether dragging down the pace. Raimi keeps the film unpredictable, but cutting 20 minutes could have amplified the tension and power dynamic.

Send Help was a frustrating film as it’s very well acted and minus some of gross-out horror elements, it’s also well directed. It just needed a few tweaks to the script properly land.