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PORTSIDE CULTURE
SEND HELP AND SAM RAIMI’S GENRE MOVIE JOY
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Eileen Jones
February 4, 2026
Jacobin
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_ Are you desperate for genre movie escapist fun amid all this hell
lately? Who isn’t? Sam Raimi’s Send Help is just what the doctor
ordered. _
Sam Raimi’s Send Help often skirts on the edge of the ridiculous.
But he knows his movie is ridiculous. And in ridiculous times, maybe
that’s what we need from cinema. , (20th Century Studios)
I like Sam Raimi’s verve as a genre movie director. He demonstrates
it in _Send Help_ with the same enthusiasm for wild action and racing
camera shots and gross jump scares and hilarious close-ups of
characters at dire points in their lives that he once brought to _The
Evil Dead_, the indie horror film that made him famous back in 1981.
_Send Help_ is a nicely stripped-down, dark comic action-adventure
thriller that suits Raimi to a T. It’s about a fortysomething
downtrodden oddball misfit named Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) who
lives alone with a pet cockatiel with whom she shares wine-drinking
evenings watching _Survivor_, plus nightly snacks and long
conversations. She works at a corporation where she’s long overdue
for a promotion. But the company founder who promised her a position
as vice president, based on her hard work and savant-like skills with
numbers, has recently died, and his pampered douchebag son Bradley
Preston (Dylan O’Brien) has taken over as CEO.
Bradley takes one gaping look at Linda, with her stringy hair and
baggy sweaters and sensible shoes and bits of tuna fish from her
lunchtime sandwich eaten at her desk still sticking to her chin, and
mentally consigns her to oblivion, career-wise. She’s physically
repulsive to him and therefore of no use to the company in his horndog
view, despite all her skills and experience and dedication. But how to
get rid of her efficiently? How about if he takes her along with his
team on a business trip to Bangkok and finds so many ways to humiliate
her, he sabotages her last chance to prove she’s worthy of keeping
her job at all, much less get promoted?
But before we can begin to settle into that plotline, there’s a
catastrophic plane crash into the ocean. The only survivors who wash
up onto a remote island somewhere off the coast of Thailand are Linda
and Bradley. He’s unconscious and has a nasty leg injury, and while
he’s lying helpless, she demonstrates her _Survivor_-learned skills
by efficiently setting up camp, gathering rainwater, and teaching
herself to hunt.
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Dylan O’Brien and Rachel McAdams in Send Help. (20th Century
Studios)
However, Bradley can’t seem to understand that he’s witnessing the
ascendance of Linda Liddle to a position of power over him. He
continues to throw his weight around, reminding her, “You work for
_me_,” and rebuking her for playing “Suzy Homemaker” on the
island when she should be concentrating all her efforts on getting
them rescued.
For Linda, once she’s on the island, there’s nothing easier to
handle than Bradley’s arrogance. She simply withdraws her labor,
walking off out of sight and not returning for a very long time. When
she finally comes back, Bradley is parched from thirst, red from
sunburn, and starving to death. He tearfully begs for her help. It’s
so satisfying, Linda is soon wondering if she ever wants to leave the
island at all — though she’s got a shameful crush on Bradley that
makes her vulnerable to his persuasive gambits. But can the apparently
chastened Bradley ever be trusted, when he’s so desperate to escape
the island and resume his regular life, which gives him unearned
wealth and authority over others?
Up to that point, Raimi moves through this narrative at a confident,
speedy pace. But then the problem becomes, what next? The answer is
further escalation of the power struggle — mind games, interludes of
détente, manipulative ruses, entrapping maneuvers, physical attacks.
All of that’s clear from the preview, by the way.
The movie’s too long — they all are, these days — so the
constant surprise twists and turns get less and less surprising. But
Raimi’s got a real ace in the hole in Rachel McAdams. I’m always
impressed by her. She’s so good at everything, from the time she
started making her mark in early roles in _Slings & Arrows_
(2003–6), _Mean Girls_ (2004), and _The Notebook_ (2004) through
later-career gems like her performances in _Eurovision Song Contest_
(2020) and _Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret_ (2023). Yet
somehow, she’s never as famous as she deserves to be. Her talent for
convincingly portraying real human beings, which is harder than it
seems and defeats a lot of actors, also prevents her from becoming a
top star, I think. She seems like one of us.
Her Linda Liddle skirts perilously close to caricature, but McAdams
always keeps her portrayal on the right side of the line. McAdams
invests in the details of Linda’s off-putting habits arising from
her intense loneliness that’s clearly driving her toward mental
instability. But McAdams is also unsparing in playing the humor of
Linda’s extremes as they’re perceived by others, like the way
she’s so socially isolated, she’s lost her ability to calibrate
how loud she’s talking or how weirdly she’s acting.
Plus there are indications early on that Linda has scary reserves of
toughness before she ever gets to the island. During the airplane
disaster, when the plane is dropping fast and one side is blown out,
the same men who, before the engine exploded, were making fun of
Linda’s _Survivor _audition tape that Bradley found online are now
hanging onto her for dear life, trying not to get sucked out of the
plane. The last one, who refuses to release his grip on her throat, is
Donavan (Xavier Samuel), Bradley’s old college frat buddy whom he
picked to get the promotion meant for Linda. “Give me your seat!”
he keeps shouting. This movie is not trying to be subtle about its
woman’s-revenge-flick effects.
Linda scrabbles for a fork and stabs Donavan’s hand, sending him
flying out. But he’s caught on a strap, hanging onto the outside of
the plummeting plane, screaming for help through Linda’s small
window. In a perfectly timed dark comic gesture, McAdams’s Linda
reaches out and slowly pulls down the plastic window shade.
Based on that, it follows logically later that Linda winds up ruling
the island. She coolly and expertly weaves a palm-frond hat while
Bradley’s once again trying to assert his dominance, then watches
him from under the hat brim with a look that’s downright predatory.
Linda’s hypercompetence at roughing it reaches absurd heights in
_Send Help,_ such as when she brings down a wild boar while armed with
nothing but a long pointy stick. But to his credit, Raimi knows it’s
ridiculous. The dark laughs immediately follow when she returns to
camp covered in blood, throws down a chunk of raw meat, and asks the
appalled Bradley, “You ever hunt? I think I like it.”
So if you’re craving genre movie escapist fun in the midst of all
this hell lately, Sam Raimi’s made _Send Help_ just for you.
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Contributors
Eileen Jones is a film critic at Jacobin, host of the Filmsuck
podcast, and author of Filmsuck, USA.
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