Film Review: Send Help 腦細天劫 (2026) - USA
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critic Circle of Australia)
I rated it 7.5/10
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ½
Support my reviews by buying me a Coffee! https://buymeacoffee.com/neofilmblog
Support our reviews by buying from official DVDs / Blu Rays at NeoFilmShop.com
Sam Raimi’s ‘Send Help’ Is the ‘Evil Dead’ of Office Politics - There is a moment about forty-five minutes into Sam Raimi’s “Send Help” where Dylan O’Brien’s character—a tech-bro boss named Bradley so perfectly odious you half-expect him to ask a coconut for a synergy meeting—attempts to “disrupt” the coconut industry by using a rock to open a nut he has just watched a native bird crack with surgical precision. He misses. The rock connects with his own thumb. The thumb is no longer a thumb. It is a crimson Rorschach test. Rachel McAdams, as his erstwhile subordinate Linda, watches him shriek with the flat, exhausted gaze of a woman who has spent seven years sitting three feet from his desk. She does not help him. She picks up the coconut.
This is the Raimi sweet spot: the place where bodily harm becomes sight gag, where pain is both real and cosmic comeuppance, where the camera cackles as much as the audience. “Send Help,” his first feature since the underrated “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” is being billed as a survival thriller—a “Cast Away” for the gig-economy era. But that is like calling “Evil Dead II” a cabin-renovation story. What Raimi has made is something rarer: a pure, unfiltered revenge fantasy for anyone who has ever had to pretend a boss’s “hot take” was a work of genius while their soul quietly departed their body.
The setup is elegant in its cruelty. Linda is a diligent assistant, the kind who knows which coffee order precedes a layoff. Bradley is her boss, a Silicon Valley stereotype so potent he practically sweats crypto. Their private jet goes down in a storm. They wash ashore on a remote island, the kind of lush, indifferent paradise that does not care about your quarterly projections. What follows is not merely a fight for survival, but a power struggle so primal it makes “The Office” look like a seminar on conflict resolution.
McAdams is the film’s anchor, and she plays Linda’s evolution with the precision of a time-lapse photograph of a flower turning into a carnivorous plant. Early scenes show her in the office, performing the invisible labor of keeping Bradley’s ego operational. On the island, that muscle memory proves useful. She can start a fire because she’s spent years anticipating his needs. He cannot open a coconut because he has spent his entire life having other people open them for him. McAdams lets us see the moment Linda realizes this: the slow, terrifying dawn that competence is its own form of power, and that power, on an island with no HR department, is absolute.
O’Brien, for his part, delivers the year’s most entertaining villain performance. Bradley is not a moustache-twirler; he is worse. He is sincere. He genuinely believes his ability to talk about “paradigm shifts” qualifies him to lead. Stranded, he tries to organize a “stand-up” on the beach. He asks Linda to take “action items” from their hunger. O’Brien plays him with such charismatic punchability that you begin to root for the island itself. You want a palm frond to fall on him. You want a crab to inherit his shoes.
The film’s greatest gamble is its tone, which Raimi navigates like a man who has spent a lifetime walking tightropes over pits of viscera. The survival sequences are genuinely harrowing—dehydration is not played for laughs—but Raimi cannot resist the occasional zoom or Dutch angle that suggests the jungle itself is enjoying this. When Linda constructs a shelter, the camera moves with the pride of a general inspecting a bunker. When Bradley attempts to “help,” the soundtrack groans like a haunted house. It is “splatstick,” the director’s patented blend of gore and guffaw, applied not to Deadites but to the living nightmare of corporate subordination.
If the film has a flaw, it is that the second act allows the psychological mind games to circle the same territory a few times too many. At 110 minutes, “Send Help” loses some of its lean efficiency in the middle, as Bradley and Linda’s power dynamic cycles through variations of “he schemes, she outlasts” without advancing the ball. There are also hints of something stranger—whispers of an “island with a secret,” glimpses of something half-glimpsed in the jungle—that Raimi ultimately chooses to leave as atmosphere rather than plot. Hardcore fans hoping for a Kandarian Dagger in the third act may feel a flicker of disappointment that the supernatural never fully arrives. Raimi keeps it grounded. Or as grounded as a film can be where a man in a thousand-dollar blazer attempts to unionize seagulls.
But when the film hits its final stretch, it earns every drop of catharsis it spills. Linda’s transformation is not presented as a moral descent but as a logical one. Raimi has always understood that survival is not about who is strongest, but who is willing to become something else. “Send Help” is, in its dark heart, a film about watching a woman shed the skin of her job and find something harder and more necessary underneath. It is a horror movie where the monster is a management structure, and the final girl is the one who used to get the boss’s latte.
“Send Help” will not be for everyone. Viewers with a low tolerance for bodily fluids should bring a friend to hold. Viewers with a low tolerance for tech executives will find it plays like a documentary. But for those of us who have sat through one too many meetings where a man explained something we taught him, it arrives not just as entertainment, but as a form of therapy. Raimi has made a popcorn movie with a shiv in its core. It is nasty, it is funny, and it understands that the scariest thing in the world is not a demon from a Necronomicon. It’s a boss who says “Let’s circle back” when you are both starving to death. (Neo, 2026)