Send Help (2026)

**½/****
starring Rachel McAdams, Dylan O’Brien, Edyll Ismail, Dennis Haysbert
written by Damian Shannon & Mark Swift
directed by Sam Raimi

by Walter Chaw It’s broad. Obvious broad. So broad that I suspect if you got too close to it, holes would start to appear, like graphics in a 16-bit video game. But for a year that’s started this dismally, this inhumanely, this dominated-by-the-little-men-who-rule-us, who respond to any perceived humiliation–especially from the women they’re trained to fear and despise–with deadly tantrums, Sam Raimi’s Send Help has the benefit of being bang on the nose. Its central manbaby is failson nepo-CEO Bradley (Dylan O’Brien), a hissable villain who likes to sexually harass women at work while elevating old frat buddies into powerful positions within the business his father founded. It’s hard to suss whether Bradley’s company is meant to have a real-world analogue because, in truth, it could be a vicious skewering of any number of companies run by little princes who inherited the role, then used every one of their bad traits to maintain their position as petty kings of a shit castle. A tiny-dicked morlock exactly like Bradley convinced me to stop climbing the ladder and start questioning the way our society programs us to believe that salaries and titles are tantamount to morality and accomplishment, when in reality they’re more often evidence of the opposite. Capitalism is WOPR’s conundrum: the only way to win is not to play the game.

Set against Bradley, Rachel McAdams’s Linda Liddle is essentially Michelle Pfeiffer’s Selina Kyle and follows an identical trajectory from put-upon office worker to strutting, hissing, mortal rebuke to the patriarchy that first underestimated, then slew her. Linda is exceptional at her job, if a bit of a slob. She doesn’t realize she has tuna salad on her lip when she meets her new boss; she has a brilliant proposal poached by an unctuous good-time boy and tries but fails to commiserate with a female co-worker in the aftermath. An object of pathos, she’s obsessed with the outdoors and camping guides and wants to be a contestant on “Survivor”. It makes sense that she would have fantasies in which her self-reliance, adaptability, and general problem-solving aptitude are valued rather than overshadowed by her social awkwardness and the fact that she’s an exceptional woman in a world infested with uninterrupted tribal dynasties of mediocre men. When Linda is invited on a bros-only business trip to be the butt of their puerility, fate intervenes, and the plane goes down in the middle of the ocean. Everyone’s dead except Linda and Bradley. Bradley–who, after all, has no real survival skills–is in trouble.

Send Help doesn’t deliver on its considerable promise. It pulls punches that a younger Raimi wouldn’t have (castration? just do it, Sam, c’mon), and while there’s plenty of punishment, up to and including spiteful cannibalism, I confess I wanted more. More catharsis, more of this man being turned into a hamburger patty by a small woman who’s actually read a book. The plane crash itself is a marvellous set-piece. There’s some good hay made from the reversal of fortunes, i.e., corporate jungle to actual jungle, and Raimi milks some decent laughs from Linda’s survivalist instincts and Bradley’s uselessness. But it’s not enough. There are a couple of signature Sam Raimi camera moves, something he even managed to sneak into the low-key morality play A Simple Plan, though there is almost none of that film’s existential despair. There’s none of the delicate character-building that might have elevated this EC Comics head-hammering into a more elegantly barbed social satire. When the final twist reveals that Linda may not be entirely justified in the extent of her vengeance, it’s flaccid, off-key, and abandoned swiftly with little explanation. What should be the explosive moment of collective ecstasy is the definition of anti-climax and, ultimately, pandering. Send Help is a movie made by someone with something to lose now, who needs a comeback. I’m not saying it’s not fine for what it is.

It’s fair to wonder whether something’s broken in me for good, because the film’s relatively high volume of gore and mayhem failed to sate the growing rage I’m feeling, to quiet my desire to finally see some sort of justice, in the temporary context of a movie or no. Send Help‘s final sting is a fourth-wall-breaking Linda telling us that no one is coming to save us, and that if we want justice, we have to get it ourselves. Yes. Sure. Tell me something I don’t know. More to the point, tell me something that isn’t so spirit-murderingly obvious at this point. Who still needs to hear this? Who’s still rallied by this? The only thing less effective would be America Ferrera stepping out of a movie-theatre queue to deliver her Barbie speech again. I wish that Raimi had just taken the training wheels off and asked if we wanted to see a dead body. 

I think about how our government has declared war on a democratic state in our nation, and how, eventually, the crosshairs will land on my beloved Colorado. How this administration is riddled with Bradleys, these vile, repugnant cowards and bullies, granted billions in armaments and absolute immunity to murder women and empathetic men for insufficiently respecting them. I have never been more disgusted by other human beings than I am by these rotten little boys. Send Help doesn’t meet the magnitude of the moment. It doesn’t get how deep the rage has taken root and borne flowers of real wrath in people like me, who would prefer to live boring lives spent with the people they love instead of getting ready to be arrested by incels and men whose wives hate them. I hope we’re at the end of it. I suspect we’re at the beginning.