Send Help (2026)

There is a particular kind of film that works precisely because it refuses to give you anyone to root for, and Send Help understands this completely. Sam Raimi drops Rachel McAdams and Dylan O'Brien onto a deserted island after a plane crash and then just... watches them eat each other. Linda Liddle is a meek, hygienically challenged corporate strategist who has been stepped on by everyone with a corner office. Bradley Preston is her new boss, a catastrophically useless rich boy whose only real survival skill is condescension. Neither of them deserves to make it home. That's the whole game. And what a game it is.

The push and pull between these two is genuinely vicious fun, the kind of back-and-forth where every shift in power feels earned and mean and a little bit delirious. McAdams commits to the bit with a ferocity that is frankly alarming in the best possible way, and O'Brien makes Bradley so thoroughly loathsome that you almost feel bad for him when the tables finally turn. Almost. When Linda paralyzes him with octopus toxin and holds his fragile ego hostage, you're cheering and cringing in equal measure, which is exactly where Raimi wants you. Did the best person win? That question becomes genuinely interesting by the third act. They're both monsters shaped by different circumstances, and the film has the nerve to let that ambiguity sit.

This is Raimi back in his element, and it shows in every frame. The crash zooms are there. The whip pans are there. The deeply unnecessary close-up of something wet and unpleasant is absolutely there. The man has not forgotten how to gross you out and make you laugh at yourself for laughing. Danny Elfman's score is doing its usual cheerful-sinister thing in the background, and the camera moves through the jungle with that particular Raimi energy that feels like the film itself is alive and slightly malevolent.

Where it stumbles is the episodic structure, which starts to feel like it's spinning its wheels somewhere in the middle act. Each new survival ordeal follows a rhythm that grows a little too predictable: power shifts, bodily fluids, dark irony, repeat. The pacing begs for a tighter editorial hand. Get on with it. The film is having so much fun being nasty that it occasionally forgets to be propulsive.

But then the third act lands, and you remember why you were there. Send Help is Raimi's best horror work since Drag Me to Hell, a raucous and genuinely mean-spirited good time that proves original mid-budget thrillers can still crack the box office when someone who actually loves cinema is behind the camera. No one wins on that island. You will leave the theater grinning anyway.