Send Help

Released 2026. Director: Sam Raimi

WOMAN VERSUS MAN. HUMAN VERSUS NATURE. Rachel McAdams, Dylan O'Brien and a tropical island star in Send Help, a blood-splattered, knives-out and eye-gouging battle for supremacy on an illusion of peaceful co-existence built on a shaky foundation of caricatures.

Linda from strategy and planning –- not accounting, as she corrects her boss --- is smart, hardworking, dedicated, your paragon of corporate efficiency but she's also awkward, shabby and her only friend is a pet parrot. Linda's boss Bradley is a nepo-baby CEO whose daddy built the business. He's spoilt, chauvinistic and arrogant. Linda hates Bradley because he undervalues her contribution and hands a VP promotion to his lazy buddy who took credit for Linda's work. Bradley disregards Linda because he's a pig who only notices women of a certain appearance. So how would they handle each other when they find themselves sole survivors on a desert island after the company jet crashed somewhere in the Gulf of Thailand?

Washed ashore with only the clothes on their backs, Linda goes about building shelter from coconut fronds and branches. She utilises her practical skills to catch fish, forage food and in one hairy instance, kill a raging wild boar, the same set of skills she displays on her audition tape for TV's Survivor, the same video her male colleagues were sniggering at right before their jet broke apart mid-air.

Bradley, on the other hand, lies unconscious with an injured leg. He's no help at all when he's awake because the only thing the man knows how to do in the open is play golf. The tables have well and truly turned and Linda is now fully in charge. As she tells Bradley when he tries to boss her around: “We're not in the office anymore.”

If it were left to Bradley, they'd be dead within days. But thanks to Linda, they have shelter, food and sometimes, even a faux beach-resort menu. No wonder she's in no hurry to leave. For once she's calling the shots, and it feels fantastic! Until Linda spots a small boat on the other side of the island and makes a lightning decision to hide away from sight and not signal for help.

This is where Send Help becomes an imitation of Triangle of Sadness, in which the toilet cleaner turned island empress of a shipwrecked super-yacht refuses rescue so she can lord over her hungry subjects now stripped of their wealth and privilege. While Triangle of Sadness is a comic satire on class warfare, Send Help belongs in a different category and should therefore be measured by a different yardstick.

This is primarily a medium-level horror flick to play up character types. Sam Raimi's direction harks back to his early works remembered for gore and blood spills. It's a mix of the incredulous and the yucky in a juvenile tit for tat for the satisfaction of personal ego. It's also ultimately hollow and completely disregards common sense.

The depiction of survival over days, weeks, who knows how long, veers into the laughably unreal. In a setting where tropical downpours are common they'd need a cave to stay dry, not under coconut trees on a beach. Bradley's facial hair doesn't appear any older than a two-day stubble. That nasty gash on his leg heals without infection in hot, humid conditions with sand in the air. Just sayin'.

The full-on madness and savagery between Linda and Bradley is a flimsy sketch of the battle of the sexes. Brad poisons Linda with berries; Linda poisons Brad with marine toxin. He gouges her eye; she stabs him. It's not a spoiler to say who wins as this conflict is lopsided from the start, with sympathy for the preordained winner unsubtly cultivated from the first scene.

Even after she has shown her dark side and murdered two innocent people in cold blood, Linda is not the villain in this rigged episode of Survivor because Bradley is irredeemable (the man can't even spell “help” – he doesn't deserve rescue).

In the end Send Help becomes incredibly cynical in what it says about morals and conflict resolution. The winner never comes clean about what happened but exploits the situation for fame and profits after rescue. To be successful in life, apparently you need to be more than vicious, you need to be quite literally cut-throat.

Defenders of Linda might argue that she's being pushed, an unappreciated worker bee who tips over the breaking point, as if that's sufficient justification. To be clear, I'm definitely not defending Bradley the low-life. Both these characters are there to fight dirty, eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, until there's only one left standing. Problem is they never come across as real people but cartoonish and exaggerated. Nevertheless to the many, many women (and men) like Linda in thankless jobs overlooked by their cruel and thoughtless bosses, Send Help is a revenge fantasy to satisfy all the pent-up sadistic impulses. Hate your boss? Watch this. Might cheer you up.

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