Send Help: A Delicious Send-Up Of Hollywood Survival Thrillers

Send Help is at once a deliriously funny horror movie and a shockingly scary comedy. Somehow, both tones co-exist without losing the essence of either. It’s an uncanny balance.

Rahul+Desai

Jan 29, 2026

Promo poster for Send Help

SAM RAIMI'S Send Help stars Rachel McAdams as Linda Liddle, a disgruntled corporate employee who finds herself stranded on an island with the sexist young CEO of the company after his private jet crashes into the ocean. She’s the better survivalist (Survival is literally her favourite reality series), so the power dynamic is reversed on the island — and she starts to enjoy it a bit too much. Her injured but smug boss, Bradley, begins to rely on her like the volleyball Wilson might have depended on Tom Hanks in Cast Away. She likes his dependence. At some point, the two even threaten to enter romcom territory, what with the days and weeks of cohabiting and building sheds and cooking and hunting together. That’s how it goes: the two enemies fall in love, and their differences are fetishised.

But that’s the thing about Send Help. It is at once a deliriously funny horror movie and a shockingly scary comedy. Somehow, both tones co-exist without losing the essence of either. It’s an uncanny balance. Instead of using gags to diffuse the tension, it uses tension to diffuse the gags. There are times it borders on Adam-Sandler-level spoofy, particularly with the over-the-top gore and unexpected violence; there’s some slapstick in the plane-crash sequence itself, even though the ‘gravity’ of the incident is never in question. There’s also a wild-boar-killing debacle that would put the Scary Movie franchise to shame. But Danny Elfman’s Edward Scissorhands-coded score keeps hinting at something darker, especially while setting up the character of Linda. It’s clear that she’s not as goofy as such protagonists tend to be; years of oppression have taken a toll on her. She’s a bit unhinged right from the beginning, so what follows is cathartic in how the script keeps challenging our perception of the hunter-hunted game. Think Gone Girl meets Six Days Seven Nights.

Every time we think Send Help is settling into a genre groove, something unpredictable and wicked happens — almost as a reminder that this is inherently a gendered workspace dramedy disguised as a survival-revenge thriller. It’s not even as simple as saying that the woman has to mutate into the men they despise in order to get their rightful dues. It’s that the woman has to just be an amplified version of ‘traditional’ gender roles — homemaking, handicraft, and basic life skills — in an environment that has no use for male agency. Linda is simply doing what she is expected to, buying into those sexist notions of domesticity with twisted gusto. The film deliberately makes us sympathise with Bradley once his agony stops being mined for laughs. We’re so used to seeing a certain dynamic between the predators and prey that the film needles us into forgetting that men are inherently predatory; it almost scoffs at us for rooting for Bradley merely because he’s the one being manipulated on the island. It’s disorienting but satisfying; the movie toys with us, as if to suggest that even the genre has to be reclaimed from the social norms of storytelling.

Rachel McAdams has had the kind of durable and ageless career that makes her a perfect candidate for the ‘romcom specialist’ who suddenly becomes an Oscar contender with a dramatic role that comes out of nowhere. She’s always had golden comic timing (her delivery of “ooh no, he died” in Game Night is the stuff of legend), but Send Help weaponises the gap between the familiarity she’s cast for and the edginess she’s not. Linda is a classic McAdams character — an inversion of her Red Eye turn — until she’s not. It’s almost like Linda Liddle perceives the alliteration of her full name as a sign of superheroism, not supervillainy. McAdams delivers a performance for the ages, fusing low-key physical satire with high-pitched psychological horror until it’s hard to tell one from the other. She commits to her director’s penchant for campy mayhem, crafting a strangely poignant cautionary tale posing as a quasi-feminist fairytale. The middle-aged frumpiness and tics make way for a Tim Burton-esque ‘creature’ of sorts, blindsiding the viewer with compassion and claws in equal measure.

Dylan O’Brien (Twinless) is deceptively effective as Bradley. It’s like he’s stereotyping the hunky-CEO heir and humanising him at once. Bradley is ‘authentic’ in spurts, but O’Brien constantly reveals that men like him aren’t magically transformed by a crisis. Not even a life-altering accident can undo decades of moral decay and entitlement; a conscience cannot be bought. The movies have led us into believing that they can change, but Send Help gleefully course-corrects the formula. It’s one of those movies that remains affecting when it runs out of flippant twists and stays naughty when it runs out of depth. It could’ve been stranded in no (wo)man’s land, it could’ve rafted out to sea into less choppy waters, it could’ve sent smoke signals into the sky. But this film needs no help — all it asks for is some suntan lotion and unisex shades.

Send Help: A Delicious Send-Up Of Hollywood Survival Thrillers

Rahul+Desai

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