With Send Help, Rachel McAdams and director Sam Raimi have created a new horror legend in Linda Liddle, an abused office workhorse who has a secret wish (with a clandestine training program) to be on Survivor someday.
Thanks to a business trip gone horribly wrong, she’s going to have a Survivor-type experience—with blood-splashing violence and psychological terror thrown in for good measure.
Nerdy, nebbish Linda has been the brains behind the scenes at a large corporation that has lost its founder. The founder’s son, toxic frat-boy Bradley (Dylan O’Brien), steps into the leader role—and chooses to ignore his father’s wishes to promote Linda. Linda, quite predictably, is crushed by the news. Bradley makes things even worse by taunting and humiliating Linda in front of her co-workers.
Nevertheless, she’s a company woman, and she gets on an airplane with her boss and his cronies to make an enormous presentation overseas, after the boss lies about that promotion remaining possible. But that presentation will never happen, because the plane crashes, RAIMI STYLE, resulting in Linda and Bradley being stranded on a deserted tropical island.
The horrors of isolation are something Raimi depicts well, having birthed the Evil Dead “cabin in the woods” genre 45 years ago. This time, the attacking forces are a combination of human depravity and crazy nature. Who needs the supernatural for scares when you have McAdams’ scorned Linda and O’Brien’s narcissist Bradley getting pushed too far? The stuff these two do to each other will long be remembered in the annals of horrific castaway thrillers.
The plotting may sound obvious and done before—but that is not the case. Yes, Raimi gave us a woman getting screwed at her job in Drag Me to Hell, but that had a demonic force as its main villain. Here, it’s as if Regina George got really, really pissed off, and became completely unhinged. She’s scarier than some demonic curse.
Among the island terrors are bugs, violent hunting, poisonous berries and seafood, crumbly ledges, whipping winds and various threats of human mutilation. Bradley, after spending a chunk of the film injured, gradually regains his strength, and … well, let’s just say he is capable of being quite unkind as well. While most of Linda’s actions are retaliatory, Send Help does a good job of making both characters, at times, despicable.
If you are a McAdams fan (I am!), Send Help is a sort of demented cinematic heaven. Watching her pull out all the stops is about as fun as things can get. O’Brien matches her work toe to toe. I imagine they will wind up being one of 2026’s best cinematic duos.
I know that times are tough, and I know your living room has a 100-inch screen in it, but this one really is worth getting out to see in a theater. I saw it with about 10 people in the theater, and those 10 folks were making a lot of fun noise—laughing, screaming, gasping, etc. If 10 people can make it a raucous time, I have to imagine some of the folks who got to see it with larger crowds had a blast.
As for Linda Liddle, I’m hoping NECA or McFarlane are hard at work on her action figure. I want a fake-blood-splattered Linda standing next to my Michael Myers from Halloween. She’s worthy!
