MOVIE REVIEW – Sam Raimi’s latest, Send Help, is a survival-horror comedy that tries to balance pitch-black jokes with genuine genre tension. The movie wobbles between satire, horror, and character drama, but Raimi’s fingerprints and the central two-hander keep it watchable from start to finish. It’s not a smooth flight, yet it’s packed with enough wild ideas and crowd-pleasing high points that you won’t want to bail early.

Very few working filmmakers can credibly claim the kind of long-term impact Sam Raimi has had on modern genre cinema. He detonated onto the scene with The Evil Dead, and the one-two punch of Evil Dead II and Army of Darkness alone would be enough to secure his place in the horror hall of fame. Raimi then proved he could thrive well beyond splatter and demons, whether it was the pop-western snap of The Quick and the Dead, the tightly wound, ice-cold suspense of A Simple Plan, or the original Spider-Man trilogy, a set of movies that helped define what mainstream comic-book filmmaking would look like for years.

Raimi ended a near decade away from the director’s chair in 2022 with Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, but plenty of fans have been waiting for him to come back with a proper horror movie. He hasn’t made one since 2009’s Drag Me to Hell, so when word hit that he’d be directing a new survival-horror project billed as Misery meets Cast Away, anticipation wasn’t exactly subtle. That’s the space Send Help lands in, and while the ride can be bumpy, it delivers enough nasty fun, oddball energy, and Raimi-style flourishes to make the trip worthwhile.

When Office Toxicity Washes Up on a Deserted Beach

Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) is smart, capable, and quietly lonely, a devoted Survivor superfan grinding away at a major firm and convinced she’s next in line for a big promotion. Then the company is taken over by Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien), a loud, sexist, self-satisfied new boss who’d rather hand the job to one of his buddies. Bradley drags Linda along on one last overseas trip before pushing her out for good, but their flight to Thailand ends in disaster when the plane crashes into the ocean.

Even in outline, it’s obvious why the premise invites comparisons to Rob Reiner’s Misery and Robert Zemeckis’ Cast Away, but Send Help doesn’t play like either. It isn’t a straight thriller, and it isn’t a nonstop horror sprint either, even though it borrows from both. Instead, it leans hardest into dark comedy, which makes sense for Raimi, whose horror has always had a streak of mischief, levity, and deliberate excess. With McAdams and O’Brien committed to the bit and Raimi staging scenes with his usual mischievous precision, the movie lands plenty of real laughs, but it also keeps tipping into broad, cheesy, over-the-top territory. That isn’t automatically a problem, it just doesn’t always mesh cleanly with the film’s overall temperature.

A Mixed Bag of Tone, Effects, and Deliberately Jerky Rhythm

Send Help also starts a little slowly, spending time on Linda and Bradley’s office rivalry before it finally hits the gas with an exhilarating plane-crash sequence. From there, the movie swings like a pendulum, alternating between slower stretches of argument and exposition on the beach and livelier detours, including Linda’s heated showdown with a cartoonish CGI boar. The effects are uneven, and several of the bigger moments look and feel like they’re leaning hard on green-screen work.

The movie’s best stretches, though, are powered by Raimi’s unmistakable eye, from uncomfortable close-ups to playful camera tricks in select action beats. Even when the digital work looks questionable, it’s at least staged with enough invention to create the kind of off-kilter horror imagery Raimi is known for. Send Help also reunites Raimi with Spider-Man composer Danny Elfman, but the score feels even more inconsistent than the movie itself, jumping across sounds and genres without settling into a cohesive identity. A lot of the film’s tonal wobble traces back to the screenplay by Freddy vs. Jason duo Damian Shannon and Mark Swift. For most of the runtime, the movie clearly wants you to root for Linda, and it’s easy to do that while Bradley remains convincingly slimy. In the third act, however, Linda crosses a line in a way that’s tough to come back from, and the film gets oddly murky about what it’s trying to say. It’s not that a likable character can’t go bad, it’s that the thematic aim becomes hard to read. That same final stretch also delivers a big, fun twist, yet it frames Linda’s controversial choice like a grand reveal, muddying the question of whether the movie still expects your sympathy.

Two Performers, Two Weapons, and a Dynamic That Actually Sparks

For all its flaws, Send Help has two undeniable assets alongside Raimi’s direction: Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien. McAdams, forever linked to Mean Girls, looks like she’s having a blast, and she makes Linda’s evolution from disregarded employee to hardened survivor genuinely engaging. The finale complicates that arc in a way that’s messy and confusing, but McAdams has the charisma to sell it anyway.

O’Brien is equally effective on the opposite end of the spectrum, turning Bradley into the kind of smug jerk you love to hate whenever he’s on screen. Still, he’s not merely a one-note villain, and midway through the film both he and Linda get enough shading to make their conflict feel like more than a single gag stretched for two hours. The story and tone can be all over the place, but spending time with these two isn’t unpleasant, largely because their will-they-won’t-they-kill-each-other chemistry crackles when the movie lets it.

-Gergely Herpai “BadSector”-