Your boss is not your friend.
You might get along with them, may even like them to a certain extent, but make no mistake: They exist on a higher plane. Their priorities differ from yours. Crack jokes with them all you want, or go bowling with them at the End of Year function, or what have you. None of that changes the fact that you are an underling. Say one wrong thing—or a few wrong things, in an untimely sequence—and all it takes is a snap of their fingers, an obligatory sit-down with HR, and you’re back on the job hunt, desperately peddling your employment profile in the virtual cold.
I’ve had some bad bosses (the micro-managing, drug-addicted kind). I’ve also worked under a few that I got along with swimmingly. Again, all more or less inconsequential: They are there to tell you what to do, and you are there to do what they tell you to do. Simple as that. Under the current socioeconomic regime, this is as hard-baked a commandment in one’s working life as the Laws of Thermodynamics are in physics. Resist these constraints at your own peril.
Send Help‘s Bradley Preston isn’t just a bad boss. He’s an insufferable one.
And Linda Liddle is a good employee; in fact, a dream employee, for any boss, particularly if you’re one as smarmy and entitled as Bradley, newly christened CEO of the American financial management company Linda has worked for going on seven years now, in the Strategy and Planning wing. She’s meek and socially awkward and something of a doormat, despite her gift with numbers. Bradley’s late father had promised her a VP position—but Bradley doesn’t like Linda very much. Her whole vibe disgusts him (thanks to an unfortunate incident involving a tuna sandwich) and he’d rather promote Linda’s direct superior, a walking Finance Bro stereotype who, unfortunately for Linda, is old Frat Bros with Bradley.
Linda’s odd, sure, but considering how director Sam Raimi—with screenwriters Damian Shannon and Mark Swift—sets up their dynamic, you’d have to be as monstrously privileged as Bradley to side with him over her. Linda lives alone with a bird named Sweetie, watching Survivor every week and fostering her own endearing desire to compete on and win the famous reality competition show; Bradley wastes no time as CEO treating subordinates with imperious contempt and lewdly targeting attractive employees, though he’s already engaged to a stunning young woman named Zuri (Edyll Ismail), who sports a luxurious engagement ring that will factor into the plot later on in a rather gruesome way.
So – Bradley is a supreme douchebag, and Linda the locus of most moviegoers’ empathy. When Linda, to Bradley’s chagrin, joins him and a few other board members on a private jet to negotiate the company’s Thailand merger, one is further primed to despise the CEO, especially once he and his buddies find Linda’s Survivor audition tape online and drive her to tears with their mockery.
Then, over the Pacific, a storm creates turbulence. Engines misfire, and suddenly the fuselage is cracked open and people are flying out, screaming. The plane goes down and Linda, just able to get her wits about her to survive, escapes the metal ruin as it sinks into the ocean.
Later, she washes up on the shore of a tropical island, seemingly leagues away from all human civilization—and who happens to be the only other survivor of the crash? Bradley Preston.
The shape of the plot, following Linda and Bradley’s marooning, should not take anyone by surprise—certainly not anyone subjected to the film’s marketing prior to and during its January 2026 release. That Linda, thanks to her convenient study of survivalist technique, gradually reverses the power dynamic between her and Bradley is Send Help‘s driving appeal. Who doesn’t want to see some rich asshole get their comeuppance? The fact that Bradley spends the majority of the film on one leg due to an injury sustained from the crash renders him even more pathetically helpless, and increasingly reliant on Linda’s know-how.
Sam Raimi has not directed a standalone major motion picture (his work on the bedeviled and ultimately tepid Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness notwithstanding) in over a decade, and Send Help signals, in a few respects, a return to form for the horror-flick auteur. Several shots harken back to his heyday with the Evil Dead franchise (that hallmark eerie camera sweep), and are just nicely composed shots, in general. It is doubly refreshing to see a more or less original script written and produced in a time of franchise IP saturation, though some viewers may draw legitimate parallels to Ruben Östlund’s 2022 black comedy Triangle of Sadness.
Now, is Send Help chock-full of artistic innovation? Definitely not, since Shannon/Swift’s script, while ably structured, is structured undeniably for the average moviegoer, and follows a predictable plot with all its twists placed where one suspects them to be, thinly concealed by rather open foreshadowing beats. Raimi’s unique touches, while welcome, are also few and far between: a hearty splash of gag-inducing gore, here, some wacky malevolence, there. A blink-and-you-miss-it Bruce Campbell cameo. But in truth, apart from these moments, Send Help could have been directed by any filmmaker of decent competency and the end result, quality-wise, would not have been significantly altered. We know Bradley will suffer his just desserts, and we know the power will get to Linda’s head. How it all happens is still a fun watch, but it’s not all that subversive.
There’s even a cheap jump scare (during an eye-rolling clichéd dream sequence) that smacks of horror’s worst tendencies, which is something one would hope a director as experienced as Raimi would know to avoid. No dice.
Fortunately, Send Help‘s two leads, Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien, sufficiently carry the 115-minute affair to its wickedly ironic conclusion. While it would be a little misleading to say that the pair have good chemistry—the whole point of the film is to highlight the basic disjointedness of their relationship—their verbal spats are executed with the right mix of humor and believable spite; and plus, it is clear that the actors are enjoying themselves, and such vivaciousness shows when the film’s more darkly comedic elements occur.
McAdams is, as always, very good (I have yet to see her turn in a less-than-convincing performance, even when the material is clearly below her talents, such as in Doctor Strange) and I forgot how downright funny Dylan O’Brien is. He’s very good at smarmy, and even the sneering expression he gives an unconscious Bradley is enough to inspire cackles. But he can deliver seriousness when the moment calls for it, too—and things get very serious for Bradley the longer he and Linda stay on the island, and the more her authority grows. Too long has O’Brien languished in the shadow of YA-centered media—give the man more roles!
Send Help will not change your life, and will most likely not offer you the range of bizarro delights Raimi aficionados have come to expect after his long hiatus. But it’s got enough unique Raimi touches, and two compelling performances, to reliably entertain. I recommend viewing it after a long week, especially after your asshole boss has been riding you more than usual, or perhaps has passed you up for a long-awaited promotion. Then you can live vicariously through Linda Liddle…to whatever extent you deem appropriate, of course. Work, after all, can be a bitch.
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