Sam Raimi is one of Hollywood’s many staple horror icons, and certainly one of the silliest. His movies are often what can only be described as completely batshit: a crude term for an equally crude filmography often boasting mountains of blood, guts, severed hands and vomit at every step of the way.
Raimi (both Sam and his cameo actor brother Ted) retired somewhat from making his blood-soaked, masterful catastrophes following the Evil Dead trilogy, whereby he was offered to direct the Spider-Man films of the 2000s we all grew up on. Since then, dips back into his frantic, B-movie origins have been irregular just as much as cautioned, and his last, Drag Me To Hell, was in 2009. It’s been almost 20 years since Raimi returned to his rambunctious roots, and 2026 has given us one of his most disgusting, hilarious outputs yet: Send Help.
Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien are stranded on a desert island after a flight goes so, so wrong (one of the most cartoonishly horrifying plane crash sequences you can find, especially in Dolby Atmos) and are forced to attempt at survival despite their tumultuous relationship. Their dynamic, once ruled so ruthlessly by the hardline grasp of a workplace hierachy, is now thrown into no man’s land. Linda (McAdams) takes control of O’Brien’s bratty nepo-baby boss Bradley after he sustains a serious wound, flipping the script into what is equally unknown territory and the certain location of Raimi hijinx.
Linda, previously established to be a pathetic, widowed bird mum on the edge of sanity in the office, is now basically feeding her boss like a baby, using all the great techniques like ‘Here comes the airplane!’ to get him to eat survival island food — though that is a little insensitive. Her near-religious, parasocial obsession with Survivor that her (comically) dead coworkers used as mockery is now reified, put to the test as she braves the island life. She’s one bad day away from performing an elbow drop on the local wildlife, but she still manages to dethrone the apex predators and decapitate boars with a spear. The perks of working in Strategy and Planning.
This utter nightmare scenario transforms Bradley from the most insufferable boss you’ll ever see into the most insufferable boss marooned on an island in the Gulf of Thailand. He’s got this laugh that sounds like he’s metamorphosing into those chattering teeth toys, and he swaggers through corporate life through casual workplace misogny; a ‘golf above all’ attitude; and disrespecting his father’s wishes, promoting his newly-hired frat friend instead of the tenured Linda.
The island gives the two of them space to become Raimi’s puppets as he strings them into an odyssey of unfiltered insanity. They’ll puke all over each other, or nearly gouge one another’s eyes out. Career staples. Being stranded here is Bradley’s least ideal destination, but Linda’s salvation. Freed from the strangling of late-stage capitalism, she’s practically the Regina George of the spot after a week goes by, serenaded in her mind by the fauna and the trees, and maybe it should stay that way forever.
I won’t spoil what follows, but Raimi and his actors craft what amalgamates to be a horrifying, hilarious, disastrously disgusting pastiche: it’s just as much of a return-to-form, Evil Dead-esque victory lap of his career as it is a Misery riff dressed with the Raimi touch. It’s an offering of chaos set to the chorus of even more mayhem and some sinister twists, with two actors working at their absolute peak to show you the intangibility of their grip on reality.
McAdams is, in quite a meta way, thrown into completely new territory. She might be used to being the queen of a clique, but certainly not a whole archipelago, and never while playing this capitalism-worn maniac. She gives an all-out performance sure to land firmly within the pantheons of the ‘good for her’ cinema that’s been moving mountains since Carrie, doing anything to stop them both from ever finding a hope of escaping their desolate heaven.
O’Brien diverges from his dual role in Twinless and commences here as the most superlative of CEO douchebags, but his unfortunate stay on the beach subjects him to nepo-baby purgatory; how is he supposed to get life’s wonders handed to him now? Fending for himself — with a broken leg, but also with magnificent incompetence — proves impossible, and he longs for nothing more than to escape from the care of his maniacal cohabitant. His desperate blandishment or pleads to emancipate himself back into the comforts of the workplace are comical if not ultimately deserved tastefuls of the utmost horrifying. Watching this in a totally empty cinema, I was laughing just as maniacally as Linda is thinking.
Send Help is a survival island of a movie, at least if you’re finding yourself ontologically adjacent to the Lindas of the world. It’s a total, bloody nightmare margined by some great jumpscares, really tapping into the cult flair of Raimi’s B-movie roots, but it’s also something you’ll never want to escape from. Every second is lavished in the kind of dread that pairs well with a bucket of popcorn and a frantic, distinctly Sam Raimi editing style that really compliments the rollicking absurdity of it all. If 2026 is going to be a generational year for the movies, we certainly needed a hall-of-fame horror comedy like this one as a nice flourish.
I sat down with director Elias Demetriou to talk about his film ‘Maricel’ which follows a Filipino domestic worker in Cyprus caring for an elderly couple who have a lot of unspoken family drama.
