Send Help Review | A Notorious, Gory And Experimental Kickback To Corporate Cruelty

Sam Raimi’s latest film Send Help bends corporate satire into survival horror, staging workplace anxiety inside a hostile, off-grid landscape. Raimi and McAdams return to each other after Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022), but the shift in scale changes the nature of their collaboration. Where the Marvel film placed McAdams in a limiting role as Dr. Palmer, Send Help gives both actor and director liberty to go absolutely bonkers in this character-driven narrative. Raimi treats survival pressure as spectacle, turning office politics into physical peril with a sharp comic edge. Body horror and gore often offers a sharp language for exploring love, hate, trauma and insecurity; but here, it becomes a ruthless reclamation of selfhood. 

The story centres on Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams), a planning and strategy executive at a Fortune 500 company. Her name exudes sunshine and cupcakes but people think absolutely otherwise. She enters the film with tangled hair, food on her face and a social awkwardness her colleagues mistake for incompetence. Although her work tells another story. Her boss prepares her for a Vice President promotion until his sudden death reshuffles power. The company falls into the hands of his entitled son Bradley (Dylan O’Brien), a golf-club heir raised on privilege. Linda does not fit his “frat bro” version of leadership and is sidelined instantly. O’Brien dominates as her opponent, drawing the audience’s irritation with a relentless parade of smug grins and arrogant chuckles. 

Fate intervenes when the firm’s private jet crashes en route to Bangkok during a tropical storm. Boss and employee wash up on a remote island with no systems left to hide behind. Linda turns out to be a fan of the TV show Survivor, who can build shelter, handle a knife and turn the island resources into an expensive-looking tropical brunch spread. Bradley arrives injured, dependent and confused. He clings to corporate hierarchy as if the island still runs on boardroom rules. Raimi uses the isolation to scrape away status, habits and posturing, leaving ego and bias exposed. Survival becomes negotiation, humiliation and confrontation wrapped into one uneasy partnership. In a way, the film frames its conflict through the nature versus nurture lens. Bradley carries the culture of male dominance, an ego trained on control and material security. Even in crisis, he clings to the last scraps of an identity built on authority and possession. Survival, for him, becomes another way to protect that image rather than rethink it.

Linda responds from a different instinct. She adapts. In the office, she pushes herself to smile and connect with colleagues as image matters here. On the island, she shifts to building, observing and planning because instinct matters more than status. She finds ways to function without ready resources on the island and for a while even guides Bradley. That balance breaks once his pride resurfaces. The film understands how quickly cooperation collapses when masculinity feels threatened, turning survival into a contest instead of a shared act.

There is nothing mild about Raimi’s queasy funhouse ride. Linda lays bare her office-life before Bradley: moments of belittlement, stolen credit, quiet snubs and the steady grind of being treated as an outcast. Her story carries the weight of a familiar workplace truth for many women. What makes the film striking is the imaginative terrain it gives that anger to occupy. Female rage is not contained here. It mutates into spectacle, texture and motion.

The film runs thick with blood and violence—animals tear through the space and storms rip the sky apart. Yet it also slips in humour with control, letting jokes breathe beside the gore, instead of dulling it. The film studies what intimacy looks like when harm sits inside desire and what kind of help can exist when both people are part of the threat. The excess feels earned because it mirrors Linda’s inner collapse. Her fury does not stay psychological. It becomes physical.

The island turns into a battlefield where humiliation converts into survival. In spirit, the film resembles Man vs. Wild (2006-2020), except the wilderness is a secondary challenge—the primary one is Linda’s disturbing emotional terrain. Bradley is stranded inside it, forced to navigate both nature and the residue of corporate cruelty. Raimi’s own question hangs over the film : “How much can we get away with? How many times can we lose the audience and win them back?” What unfolds is not spectacle for thrill alone, but a charged reimagining of what happens when professional erasure finds a body, a landscape and finally a voice. 

Make no mistake. The film offers no safe side for the audience to settle into while the story unfolds. Linda proves as dangerous a presence as Bradley, especially within a natural world that feels unguarded and unstable. The terrain does not protect either of them and neither do their intentions. Suspicion becomes the film’s default language. The pleasure of watching lies in that uncertainty. One keeps guessing where loyalty ends and survival begins. The film refuses to hand out answers early and holds its cards until the final stretch, letting character, violence and wit collapse into each other with unnerving precision. McAdams plays Linda with feral electric energy and persistent spirit even amidst adversity, while O’Brien commits to Bradley’s spoiled demeanour. Their performances sync with Raimi’s taste for escalation, pushing the film into increasingly unstable, funny and threatening territory. 

Between the tension, Linda and Bradley find pockets of camaraderie. One such pause arrives around a small bonfire, where they ferment bananas into homemade wine, unwind and trade fragments of their past. The moment opens a brief window into what a healthy bond between them might look like. Linda is sharp, unpredictable and often cruel. Bradley, though shaped by privilege and the scars of parental neglect, carries a capacity for decency beneath his polished exterior. 

Yet Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien turn even warmth into a setup. Their performances work like a bait-and-switch, inviting trust and then snapping it away. That instability becomes the film’s engine. With protagonists who refuse reliability, the narrative gains its rhythm. Punchlines land without warning. Jump scares cut through conversations. Comedy and threat coexist in the same breath. The result keeps the viewer alert at every turn, balanced between laughter and unease, never allowed the comfort of certainty.

Since Drag Me to Hell (2009), Raimi has directed only two films, Oz the Great and Powerful (2013) and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Both were spectacle-driven extravagant experiences but left little space for the twisted humour and inventive gross-out gags that made his early work so distinctive. Send Help reclaims that territory, turning corporate power struggles into a playground of physical comedy and psychological tension. Raimi balances absurdity with menace, making cruelty revealing and pressure entertaining. For viewers longing for the return of classic Raimi, the film delivers exactly what they have been waiting for.