Send Help (Trailer Review)

Sam Raimi makes his return to the horror genre for the first time in 15 years with Send Help, a survival horror that's been described as a cross between Rob Reiner's Misery and Robert Zemeckis' Cast Away, with an unacknowledged but unmissable sprinkling of William Golding's Lord of the Flies and Coralie Fargeat's Oscar-winning sci-fi/body horror/Hollywood satire, The Substance. 

Horror is the genre that catapulted Raimi's career as a filmmaker. Before he set aside the bloody thrills and haunted-house chills in favor of more lighthearted, spider web-swinging, superhero silliness in his Spider-Man series, Raimi made his bones with his 1981 directorial debut, The Evil Dead, which combined a classic teens-in-a-cabin-in-the-woods scenario (popularized a year earlier by Sean Cunningham and Victor Miller's Friday the 13th) with demonic possession and slapstick splatter. The result was a shrill, irritating attempt at a horror comedy that proved neither scary nor funny. The makeup effects are horrendous, the sound effects grate on the nerves, the puppetry is embarrassing, and worst of all, the characters are uniformly unsympathetic and unrealistic. It has the feel of a first film made by someone who had just gotten out of film school and decided to throw anything and everything at the wall to see what would stick -- and couldn't care less if none of it did.

Then in 2004, Raimi demonstrated that the 23-year gap allowed for much-needed growth with his supernatural haunted house chiller, The Grudge, very likely the first horror film I ever saw in the theater at the age of five. Its skin-crawling scares and nightmarish visuals sent me jumping back into my seat then, and it remains one of the most potent examples of horror at its most purely terrifying. A mere five years later, Raimi surpassed himself once more with his last horror film (up until now), Drag Me to Hell, another supernatural shocker that combined his early affection for gory slapstick and black-as-blood humor with pulse-pounding jump scares, gross-out imagery, and a moral conscience, elevated by one of the most relatable, three-dimensional protagonists in modern horror. 

The ending of his last -- which saw Christine Brown literally being dragged to Hell in front of her traumatized, powerless boyfriend in a twist equally clever and gut-wrenching -- is going to be a tough one to beat, but Raimi is giving it the old college try with the simply titled survival thriller, Send Help. Rachel McAdams and Dylan O'Brien co-star as Linda Liddle and Bradley Preston, two colleagues on opposite ends of the corporate ladder. True to her last name, Linda is the little guy (or rather girl), a smart but meek hard worker who has clearly put her work before everything else in her life (or maybe that's because she has nothing else in her life). Despite being portrayed by the naturally stunning McAdams, Linda is markedly unattractive, sporting a lonely, single-woman sweater to conceal a collared button-down above a pair of professional-looking khakis. Every day, she sits at a desk within a soul-crushing cubicle, typing away frantically and tapping her feet trepidatiously.

One afternoon, she's called into the office of her boss, Bradley Preston, a condescending, smarmy misogynist who relishes the power bestowed on him by the company and wields it with the vigor of Jason Voorhees with his machete. "I'm going to be frank with you. You are smart. I know that you are great with numbers. But I just don't think you got it. As an executive, I see no value in you. Does that make sense?" I'm sure there's more to the conversation, but the gist demonstrates the power imbalance between the protagonists. Preston commences his scolding with a compliment to butter Linda up before dropping the bomb on her. It's a dialogue that evokes the already-iconic shrimp scene between Dennis Quaid and Demi Moore in The Substance, in which the former -- the producer of the fitness show from which Moore's character has derived her fame and fortune -- invites the latter to lunch to gently break the news that she's too old to elicit the erections of the perverted men who watch her any longer. Then in an evocation of Drag Me to Hell, in which Christine Brown is pitted by her boss against a rival co-worker for a promotion to assistant branch manager, Preston reminds her (while playing golf in his office to flaunt his wealth and indifference to his subordinate's feelings), "You know we have the Bangkok merger coming up. Prove me wrong." 

With her mousy, poorly brushed hair hanging sloppily on both sides of her face, McAdams masters the body language of a shrinking violet struggling daily to earn the respect for which she works so desperately, her head drooped in shame, her face working overtime to stifle an enraged scream of righteous indignation at the complaint of noxious body odor. 

En route to a business-oriented destination, the plane carrying the company workers suddenly crashes onto an island, leaving the only two survivors -- Preston and Linda, naturally -- stranded. Waking up on the shore, Linda discovers her boss' body in the sand, alive but paralyzed by a broken leg. The instinct for survival unveils a resourcefulness and courage that even Linda probably didn't know resided within, and being the goodhearted person she is, uses her skills to nurse Preston back to health. However, once she realizes the horror of their ordeal hasn't corrected her ungrateful boss' condescension or misogyny -- "Getting us out of here, that should be your focus. Not being Suzie Homemaker over here." -- but has shifted the power dynamic in their relationship, the opportunity for some well-earned comeuppance might just prove too delectable to resist. "Let's not forget, I'm your boss! You work for me!" With a tone of intimidating sternness, Linda retorts, "We're not in the office anymore, Bradley."

Filmed in Thailand and Australia, cinematographer Bill Pope appears to take great advantage of the natural grandeur of the tropical island, utilizing aerial shots to capture resplendent topography -- the crystal-clear blue of the ocean, the dark green bushes and bright green palm trees that encircle the protagonists -- that contrasts its heavenly scenery with hellish desolation. For the first time in his unfairly privileged life, Bradley is now reduced to the little guy, injured, helpless, terrified, and under the control (and at the mercy) of the quiet, homely outcast he thought he could get away with belittling and dehumanizing for years. Apparently, all that bullying has brought out a monster in little Linda Liddle, who will proceed to exploit her position as the healthier, more physically fit, and mentally agile of the duo for both good and evil, much like Kathy Bates' unhinged number-one fan(atic), Annie Wilkes. Initially, Linda takes pity on Bradley and uses her newfound survival skills benevolently, blanketing him in his sleep with an oversized plant, creating a fire with sticks, impaling fish in the water with a spear for food. However, as more days tick by with no sign of help in sight, she begins to tap into a darker, primordial dimension of herself, decapitating a boar when fish prove unsatisfying or insufficient (splattering its blood on the astonished, shaken face of Bradley in the process). Scarier, Linda realizes how much she enjoys this side of herself, losing her capacity for compassion or sanity. "You ever hunt?" she asks breathlessly, her face and shirt showered in the animal's blood. "I think I like it." 

Based on an original idea by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, the screenwriting duo behind Freddy vs. Jason and the remake of Friday the 13th, the trailer makes it difficult to discern the exact tone director Raimi is hunting for. The story of two people who despise one another stranded on a deserted island, forced to set aside their differences and depend solely on their wits and wills to make it back home alive, the most fundamental goal of the human species, is definitionally dark and suspenseful. But the exaggerated personalities of the battling protagonists (Preston's wealth-fueled soullessness and Linda's initial utter lack of spine) paints a more campy picture than may be needed to generate true nail-biting anxiety and excitement. 

The power of Send Help will most definitely rest on the shoulders of its two-person cast, and based on this trailer, O'Brien and McAdams appear to have understood the assignment. Both of their characters are sent on a journey of self-discovery and personality-transformation. In the real world, protected by the comfort of his office and inflated by the power to control those beneath him, Bradley Preston is a parasitic sadist who thrives on the suffering and service of others. Once stranded and under the care of a gradual madwoman, he will learn a lesson about humility, the importance of treating people with fairness and decency, and perhaps most crucially of all, the potentially life-saving benefit of displaying gratitude. O'Brien conveys the fear he never had to experience before, highlighted in an extreme close-up of a single tear cascading down his trembling face that evokes Daniel Kaluuya's hypnosis scene from Get Out. 

For her part, McAdams is given the exciting opportunity to play a villain for the first time in 20 years since her career-making performance as queen plastic Regina George in Mean Girls. The only difference is her previous villain was restricted by the confines of a (physically) harmless teen comedy; this one is cut loose on the bloody, rule-free island of a horror movie where nothing is off limits in pursuit of revenge and survival. Essentially, McAdams is playing a grown-up version of Lindsay Lohan's Cady Heron, turned by extreme circumstances into the power-obsessed bully whom she would find herself dedicating her life to both impressing and demolishing. "You are stuck with an asshole boss just like I was," Linda says while heating the tip of a knife in a fire. "Although I'm betting I am a much nicer boss than you ever would have been. Except for maybe this part," indicating her intention to possibly amputate her boss' leg in what would surely be a show-stopping set piece of cringe-inducing, fist-pumping grotesquerie. The steely determination in McAdams' eyes reflects a drastic departure from the long-suffering cog in the corporate machine we meet at the start, choking back tears in her callous boss' office until she's finally able to let it out in the privacy of her car.

Will Linda and Bradley actually manage to overcome their mutual animosity and develop a respect and care for one another to better their chances of survival? This being a horror film, I certainly hope not. It's safe to assume only one of them will emerge triumphant from the island, and my hope is that winner is Linda -- a hope validated by a low-angle shot of her leaping across a branch with an upraised spear, and a final shot of her throwing her head back and emitting what looks like a psychotic howl of jubilation, her face painted possibly in the blood of her slain adversary. Her sense of self-preservation becomes so ruthless, in fact, that she feels no qualms about using a coconut to bash a snake to smithereens. However, with a series of lightning-fast images depicting the duo running through the forest, nearly drowning in the ocean, and hunting each other, the trailer does a good job concealing which direction the outcome will steer.

Although his ingredients are instantly familiar, Sam Raimi's belated return to the horror genre has the makings of a visually compelling, intellectually engaging, and darkly humorous slice of survival horror, using a high-concept premise of adversarial leads stranded on an island and pitted against each other in a power struggle to impart gorily timely commentary on workplace misogyny and female empowerment.

Who (if anyone) do you think will make it out alive? What will be left of them, physically and mentally? Find out when Send Help crashes into theaters on January 30, 2026, courtesy of 20th Century Studios. Check out the trailer below.

Side note: The poster lists February 6 as the release date, but that applies only to the UK.