Send Help

Send Help follows Linda Liddle and her boss, Bradley Preston, who survive a plane crash and wash up as the only survivors on a remote, deserted island. Stranded with old workplace grudges, limited resources, and rising tensions, they face the elements, each other, and shifting power dynamics in a battle for survival—and perhaps something more final.

Send Help Review

Regina George has nothing on Linda Liddle. Rachel McAdams is a pure, unhinged delight as a brilliant but socially awkward business analyst and survivalist junkie, a woman whose instability is wielded with equal parts delicacy and blunt force. As we watch her fall apart, reassemble, and crack again, Dylan O’Brien and director Sam Raimi join her in delivering the kind of precarious, shifting-sand thriller that used to be the backbone of mid-budget cinema.

Where lesser performances might soften Linda’s edges—playing her awkwardness for laughs or sympathy—McAdams does something far riskier. She alienates the audience while simultaneously toying with our empathy. Her social discomfort is strategically misleading: the script hints that her fractures may have always been there, but McAdams keeps you guessing about how much is circumstance and how much is revelation. You’re never allowed to settle into rooting forher so much as bracing yourself with her. By the film’s end, you feel exhausted and used—but in exactly the way this kind of thriller should leave you.

O’Brien is the perfect counterweight. His character is rude, calculating, shallow, and never especially charming, yet just broken enough to earn a sliver of audience concern. He doesn’t feel dangerous because he’s unpredictable—he feels dangerous because he’s painfully honest about who he is. The film gains much of its tension by volleying honesty and trustworthiness back and forth between two deeply compromised people, neither of whom ever fully deserves allegiance.

Their contrast is initially clean: she begins the film uncomfortable in her own skin, unable to function in the world she occupies, while he moves through it with inherited ease and social fluency. Once stranded together, those dynamics invert. McAdams, barely a physical threat and pointedly stripped of any modern “girlboss” invincibility, is given a force multiplier instead—her obsessions, routines, and peculiar fixations become survival tools. O’Brien, injured and raised in total luxury, finds himself helpless without the systems that once insulated him. They learn to work together, begin to respect one another, and then—inevitably—betray each other, repeatedly. By the end, he may be the saner of the two, but sanity proves to be a thin shield in isolation.

Raimi orchestrates this descent with Machiavellian grace. His camera is far more restrained than in his earlier work, matured into something subtler and more patient, but his instincts remain unmistakable. He psychotically toys with audience allegiances, refusing to grant a stable moral foothold or sustained relief. Just when a scene threatens to release tension, Raimi introduces a note of wrongness—a pause, a look, a betrayal-in-waiting—that keeps the ground shifting beneath you. The film is cruel, playful, and amused by the audience in equal measure.

Send Help is not a particularly deep or intricate psychological thriller, and it has no interest in being one. There’s no grand thesis, no layered metaphor begging to be unpacked. Its simplicity is the point. By stripping the premise to its bones, Raimi leaves everything to timing, atmosphere, and two heavyweight performances willing to make themselves unpleasant. The result is a tight, focused thriller that doesn’t pander, doesn’t sermonize, and doesn’t confuse emptiness for depth.

In an era where big studios substitute spectacle for chemistry and smaller films substitute messaging for story, Send Helpis a reminder of what’s been lost: a mean little movie that trusts its audience to sit with discomfort, ambiguity, and fun. It won’t be for viewers who demand likable characters or moral clarity—but for anyone willing to be twisted into knots and left there, it works exquisitely well.

WOKE REPORT

I know that some of you are going to disagree, and I’d love to hear from you in the comments

If it Looks Woke and It Smells Woke…

• Some of you are going to rail against this, and I understand why. Taken at face value—judged purely by its visible components—this movie looks undeniably woke: a character type audiences have been conditioned to read as female wish-fulfillment, familiar dude-bro archetypes, and a cluster of cues that usually signal a lecture rather than a story.
  • But Send Help asks for something rarer than agreement: patience.
  • Wokeness is agenda-driven by design. It prioritizes messaging over narrative, instruction over immersion. That isn’t what’s happening here. While the film employs archetypes that have been overused—and often abused—by contemporary filmmakers, it does so intentionally and with restraint. Nothing is there to score points or shame the audience. Everything is there because the film needs it to function.
  • This is a work of careful calibration. Every element is balanced against the others, and none can be altered without breaking the whole. Soften a character, tip a perspective, offer an early concession—and the spell collapses. Raimi’s direction depends on letting the film be what it is, on its own terms.
  • Both of the main characters must be exactly who they are, or else.
• I ultimately landed on Woke-ish, and that distinction matters. McAdams’ character is given a hair more initial sympathy—but not as a statement and not as instruction. It’s a functional tilt, one that the film needs in order to keep its footing. Remove it, and the structure collapses.
  • What Send Help understands—and what so few modern thrillers do—is that suspense comes from instability. This is a thriller that actually thrills because you’re never allowed to settle into a fixed perspective. The film can shift whose viewpoint you’re inhabiting from moment to moment, sometimes within the same exchange, even the same sentence. Just when you think you know where you stand, the ground moves.
  • That’s why the character balance has to be exact. Not equal—exact. Any effort to sand down the edges, to “correct” the optics, or to clarify who the audience is supposed to side with would drain the film of its tension. Raimi’s craftsmanship lies in his refusal to do that.
  • It’s also why the movie feels almost anachronistic in the best way. Twenty years ago, no one would have argued over its politics. It would have been recognized as what it is: a tightly calibrated thriller that trusts ambiguity, allows flawed people to remain flawed, and prioritizes suspense over signaling.