Director: Sam Raimi Screenplay: Damian Shannon and Mark Swift Cast: Rachel McAdams, Dylan O'Brien Year: 2026
Sam Raimi's return to theatrical horror was one of the most anticipated moments on the 2026 calendar. Raimi carries the DNA of one of the genre's foundational franchises through "Evil Dead II" and beyond, and his recent producing work on "Evil Dead Rise" and "Evil Dead Burn" kept his name tied to modern horror. "Send Help" is his return to directing his own material, and the first thing to say about the film is the most uncomfortable: it is not horror. Or at least, not in the way the word is usually used. It's a dark survival comedy with a few horror elements that feel added almost as a concession to the genre, elements that could come out of the film without substantially affecting what the film is. And yet, as dark comedy, it works quite well.
In "Send Help" we follow Linda (Rachel McAdams), a dorky, socially awkward employee at a company where almost no coworker tolerates interacting with her beyond the strictly necessary, and the company's new owner (Dylan O'Brien), an heir recently installed in the position after his father's death, who is now reorganizing the firm to his taste. Both end up on a work trip when their plane malfunctions and crashes on a deserted island. He comes out of the accident hurt and with no idea how to survive in that environment; she, to his surprise and to the viewer's, turns out to have a set of survival skills nobody would have imagined. From there the film dedicates itself to studying what happens when a professional power relationship is completely inverted.
The most interesting thing about "Send Help" is that inversion and how far Raimi carries it into its most uncomfortable consequences. Once it's clear Linda is the only reason the man is still alive, the film refuses the viewer the easy satisfaction of a romantic redemption or a clean empowerment arc. Linda discovers she holds power for the first time in her life and decides not to let it go, actively delaying and sabotaging the rescue attempts to preserve the dynamic in which he depends on her. He, for his part, does not surrender: he tries to escape on his own, to deceive her, to find exit routes that don't include her. The film builds a double-villain relationship in which the viewer has no clear figure to identify with; both characters are unpleasant, both are lying, both are manipulating, and yet the film manages to keep you interested in what happens to each of them.
McAdams and O'Brien sustain that balance with a chemistry that does half the work. Raimi's comedy works because both actors are willing to let their characters be genuinely unpleasant without seeking the audience's sympathy rescue, and because they have the physical and verbal timing to make the most uncomfortable situations also the funniest. It's exactly the line between horror and comedy that Raimi had mastered in the Evil Dead trilogy, applied this time to a more restrained register with less blood on screen.
Where "Send Help" disappoints is in an unexpected place, and it is in the use of CGI. Raimi is one of the flagship directors of practical-effects cinema; work with miniatures, prosthetics, and physical craft has been part of his signature from the start. In "Send Help" there is a surprising amount of CGI, and it is CGI that fails to integrate with what the film is trying to be: it looks obvious, it looks cheap for the production level, and in several scenes it breaks the tone that the performances had built up so carefully. Coming from any other director it would be a normal technical complaint; coming from Raimi it's hard not to read it as a deliberate choice, and even then it stands as the film's weakest point.
The other asterisk is the genre classification. "Send Help" was sold as Sam Raimi's return to horror, but the horror here lives mainly in the premise (the accidents that make the island more dangerous as the film goes on) and in the occasional pointed moment of tension. The real spine is the dark comedy and the study of mutual manipulation. As a study of two characters under pressure, the film is solid; as dark comedy, it is entertaining and paced with confidence; as horror, it comes up short and doesn't gain much from trying to belong to that category.
Fans of the Raimi behind "Evil Dead II," with that characteristic mix of grotesque horror and physical comedy, will find in "Send Help" a more restrained but recognizably tempered exercise. Those hoping for the director's return to pure horror will leave with the feeling that the label was misleading. And those willing to read it as a dark survival comedy will find an entertaining, well-acted film with more psychological edge than its premise lets on.
Rating: 8/10
Final Analysis (Spoilers ahead)
The real question "Send Help" closes on is not what happens on the island but what kind of film it was being the whole time. Raimi sets up the premise as a survival thriller with horror accents, but the development dismantles that reading scene by scene. Every situation that in another film would be a moment of pure terror (the plane, the island's dangers, the wounded character's physical vulnerability) ends up here processed through the comic dynamic between the two protagonists. The horror is not what threatens Linda and her boss: the horror is the comfort with which Linda decides to settle into her new position of power, and the naturalness with which the boss does the same with deception. The film is about that double moral degradation, not about survival.
The inversion of power is the axis Raimi builds most patiently. In the corporate world, Linda, although valuable to the company, is expendable, and the man who has inherited the company is the active subject; on the island, that relationship flips completely and neither of them is willing to return it to its earlier state. Linda, for the first time in her life, is indispensable, and she has understood that off the island she becomes invisible again; her sabotage is not sadism but an attempt to hold onto the only version of herself she has experienced as valuable. The boss, for his part, cannot accept depending on someone who, in the original hierarchy, was not supposed to exist on his radar; his escape attempts without her are not just pragmatism but an active rejection of the inversion.
The comic tone that sustains the film is also what prevents it from being read as a manipulation tragedy. Raimi handles the situations with enough lightness that the viewer does not weigh them with the moral heaviness their structure would suggest, and this is probably a deliberate choice; the film asks the viewer to laugh with the discomfort, not to interrogate it in depth. It is also for this reason that the most obviously horror elements, those placed there to justify the label, feel disconnected: the film is about the friction between two people who are no longer in their usual place, and everything that pulls it away from that central friction subtracts more than it adds. The real payoff is not in the supernatural or the violent but in what both characters are capable of doing to each other once the hierarchies of the outside world disappear.
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