Send Help

★★★⯪

Send Help (2026)

Runtime: 114 minutes

MPAA: Rated R for strong/bloody violence and language.

Linda Liddle's (Rachel McAdams) life is mundane and quite frankly, miserable. She's in the strategy and planning department, but also socially awkward and unappealing. The company's boss recently passed, and the CEO position has been passed down to his son Bradley Preston (Dylan O'Brien). You see, Linda's expecting a promotion as promised by her former boss, but Bradley awards the promotion to his former fraternity brother and new employee Donovan Murphy (Xavier Samuel), which causes Linda to confront Bradley. Impressed by her boldness, he invites her on a business trip to Bangkok via a company private jet, so that they can seal a company merger.

Even on the plane, Bradley and his close colleagues laugh at Linda's audition tape for Survivor, which Donovan discovered. Before anything further can happen, in a dramatic sequence, the plane's engine fails, causing the cabin to decompress and suck those who didn't wear their seatbelts in time out of the plane. It ends up crashing into the ocean, presumably killing everyone except Linda. Washing up ashore on a remote island on the Gulf of Thailand, she walks around, discovering that Bradley has also survived the crash. What begins as a familiar survival tale slowly unravels itself to be a power reversal, one that satirises workplace dynamics in ridiculously dark and funny ways. Directed by Sam Raimi, he also sprinkles several scares, comical zoom-ins into facial features, and a scene that opens with a spider crawling around its cobweb, referencing his other works.

Bradley is the new CEO. Linda is merely an employee. Bradley's inheritance of the position is clearly the result of nepotism, in which he leverages this power for personal interests. He's arrogant and entitled, treating employees like Linda with contempt, while favouring his associates and more attractive women that step into his office. On the island, the dynamics of the corporate world don't matter anymore, where survival is the primary necessity. What's fascinating is that despite the mistreatment Linda receives from the people around her, she always gives them the benefit of the doubt, until she realises that they aren't redeemable. As she says, "never mistake my kindness for weakness."

This role reversal unexpectedly finds Linda having the upper hand in this situation, where Bradley has to rely on Linda's survival skills for food, water and shelter. Her enthusiasm for Survivor and extensive knowledge about how to adapt to living on an island has finally paid off. With this newfound authority, it looks like Linda is finally having some grisly fun. By refusing to signal even when she spots a rescue boat, she essentially creates her own twisted game where she manipulates Bradley and reduces him to nothing, making him plead for her help to survive. What follows are numerous hilarious interactions in an exhilarating ride. A figuratively and literally toxic transactional relationship begins, descending into greater madness.

Bradley learns from his mistreatments and embarks on a path to redemption, connecting with Linda, them sharing stories together and the conflict slowly resolving. Which makes it initially off-putting that he then tries to poison her and escape from the island. I admittedly was scratching my head on the emotional arc reset, but thinking about this later, it's a ruse - a deliberate choice that shows that some people really never change. The constant need to assert workplace hierarchy has never been erased from him. It's approximately around this point where the laughs stop and the pacing begins to lag, but things take a turn for the worse from here onwards.

In what mostly is a two-hander, McAdams, through the production styling and performance, turns Linda from a shy and timid employee to a ruthless, autonomous figure, one whose actions on the island also demonstrates that she has mastered the system and the art of manipulation. It's not just her embodiment; even Linda herself is a fantastic actress. And O'Brien, who might seem like a funny choice, is unexpectedly great at playing a privileged asshole who sees people as nothing but hurdles to be overcome to maintain his position. Thomas in the Maze Runner was never this selfless. As Send Help approaches its violent and absurd climax, one can also see Linda's weight of guilt haunt her, eventually culminating in a twist ending that puts her in power. Bradley pretends to have repented from his actions, but Linda is cunning enough to deduce otherwise. It's a bloody good resolution where she finally gains control, but also shows her capability to be just as ruthless to ascend to the top of the system. What a ride.

Note: There's a website called KidsInMind that does, which I quote, " goes beyond the MPAA ratings: Movies are rated according to how much sex, nudity, violence, gore & profanity they contain." Send Help was rated: 3.7.7. The violence and gore level, at 7, is numerically the same as a PG-13 movie like Avengers: Infinity War. Subsequently, I went in with the impression that there would be some blood, some violence, but not too severe. What I got instead was a boar being graphically murdered, stabbed in the body and eye with a spear, causing blood to spill everywhere, a thumb entering an eye socket, scalping, and people dying in a plane crash. Questionable score, indeed. Oh, and not to mention, the person who carried the content evaluation had to also manually count every instance that the f-bomb was uttered. What an interesting website.