There’s something strangely comforting about watching a filmmaker as unique as Sam Raimi absolutely cut loose again. Send Help doesn’t just mark a return to the original madness that made audiences fall in love with the director behind the original Evil Dead and Spider-Man trilogies, Darkman, and Drag Me to Hell, among others. It feels like a reminder of why his brand of horror, equal parts sadistic, playful, and morally squishy, still hits harder than most. This is old-school gross-out cinema, executed with a modern confidence and two star performers who are more than willing to be humiliated, coated in filth, and pushed into psychological freefall for our entertainment. It’s a blast and a half.
Linda (Rachel McAdams) is a “homely” office outcast, at least, homely in the way only a movie can pretend Rachel McAdams is. She’s hardworking, overlooked, and surrounded by a bullpen of smug, bro-y executives who happily steal credit for her work while treating her like a human inconvenience. She’s also painfully earnest, armed with elder millennial cringe and a quiet desperation for her life to finally get better. Linda places her hopes on Bradley (Dylan O’Brien), a smooth corporate climber she has a mild crush on, believing his arrival as the new boss might finally tilt the scales in her favor.
It does not.
Bradley is repulsed by Linda. Not in an outright monstrous way at first, but through passive cruelty and an assumption that his authority is both earned and absolute. He plans to give her job away to someone far less deserving, but first, he throws her the tiniest professional bone by inviting her on an overseas business trip. Cue a horrifically entertaining plane crash sequence, and now the two are the only survivors on a remote tropical island.
From there, Send Help becomes a gloriously unhinged physical and psychological battle. Raimi and his longtime legendary cinematographer Bill Pope waste no time leaning into obscene close-ups of bodily functions and orifices. This movie is wet. It’s sticky. It’s filled with vomit, blood, sweat, guts, and some of the most creatively disgusting imagery Raimi has ever put on screen. One particular sequence involving vomit had my entire theater audibly gagging, groaning, and laughing in unison. It was a beautiful reminder that communal revulsion is one of cinema’s great unifiers.
What elevates the film beyond mere endurance testing, though, is how sharply it observes power dynamics. Linda, it turns out, is a survivalist at heart. Her home is filled with relics of worldly exploration, her favorite show is (of course) Survivor, and once they wash ashore, she immediately begins applying real-world knowledge to stay alive. Bradley, meanwhile, keeps trying to pull rank, barking orders that mean nothing now that capitalism has literally sunk into the ocean. The imbalance flips fast, and watching it happen is deeply satisfying as Linda thrives and Bradley deteriorates.
Send Help makes that transformation visual in a way that’s both hilarious and pointed. Linda becomes more radiant, confident, and self-actualized as the days pass, while Bradley devolves from manicured executive into a sunburnt, feral wreck. O’Brien, who continues to prove himself as generational talent after Ponyboi and Twinless, delivers a “crazy face” here that he wields with remarkable precision. It becomes a key instrument, his eyes slowly betraying panic, resentment, and a dawning realization that he’s simply not built for this.
The relationship between the two never settles into something easy. There’s sexual tension, resentment, genuine honesty, and outright hostility, often within the same scene. A fireside conversation where both characters unpack their emotional trauma is surprisingly tender, and it complicates both their own feelings towards each other and the audience’s feelings towards them. But the real engaging factor here is the friction between the two characters, and how it continuously expands and contracts throughout the film.
The island has given Linda her clarity, her agency, and a version of herself she was never allowed to be in the real world. Bradley, on the other hand, desperately wants out, clinging to the hope of structures that once protected him. Their brief split into separate camps is an almost Lord of the Flies-esque breakdown that plays brilliantly, with Linda constructing a self-made paradise while Bradley’s sad little attempt at independence collapses almost immediately.
The film isn’t flawless, of course. There are pacing issues, and one particularly bold scene chickens out at the last second, refusing to fully commit to a choice that would’ve been genuinely jaw-dropping. There’s also a late-stage reveal that should be darkly hilarious but ends up feeling more like a bit of a cop-out, even if it feeds into the film’s twisted sense of humor. Still, the ending manages to be wildly violent fun in a way that feels genuinely earned.
What lingered with me most, though, was how intentionally uncomfortable Send Help is. The shifting power dynamics sometimes make it hard to know who to root for, and that uncertainty appears to be the point. Sitting with that discomfort for a few days - and even finding myself excitedly describing the movie to others - really made me appreciate it more. Sometimes you need to talk a movie out to realize how much it got under your skin.
This is Raimi doing what he does best: pushing performers to the brink, shoving the camera right up into places it absolutely does not belong, and daring the audience to laugh, gag, and recoil all at once. Send Help is a genuine fucking thrill ride. It’s old-school gross-out horror with surprising nuance, two phenomenal actors going full sicko mode, and the kind of communal theatrical experience we don’t get nearly enough anymore.
‘Send Help’ is now playing in theaters.
