Conceptually, Send Help (2026) feels a little like it hopped on a bandwagon. The basic set-up and meticulous plot beats could have come out of a mid-twenties screenwriting playbook. But is there enough pizzazz in the execution to overcome a scenario that feels so heavily road-tested?
Dowdy financial strategist Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) is a workhorse at a high-profile finance firm, a whiz with numbers whose climb up the corporate ladder has stalled out thanks to off-putting social behavior, not to mention a healthy side of misogynist cronyism. Her company’s new boss is Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien), the son of the deceased company founder who served as Linda’s mentor, who had promised her a promotion. Bradley has no intention of seeing that promise through, sending Linda into an awkward emotional spiral. The tables turn, however, when the two of them end up the only survivors of a south Pacific plane crash while on their way to Bangkok. On a deserted island, Linda — an avid Survivor enthusiast — displays the practical skills necessary to not only feed and shelter herself, but to save Bradley’s life. Her resourcefulness in the face of adversity, coupled with Bradley’s mean-spirited uselessness, quickly alters the power dynamic, leading to a vicious battle of wills.
Send Help possesses director Sam Raimi’s familiar visual flair and gruesome sense of humor, which lurches into gross-out territory at times but delivers genuine laughs. McAdams leans into the mischievous, deranged quirk of her character, clearly having the time of her life playing against type, while O’Brien’s broad villainy reveals a keen ear for comedy. Unfortunately, though, everything else about Send Help is broad as well, taking the nuanced absurdism of Triangle of Sadness and slapping a horror-comedy coat of paint over it. The results are generally entertaining, occasionally even striking, but it all unfolds precisely as one might expect given the elevator pitch — which makes it about as surprising as microwaved leftovers.
