Send Help (2026) Review

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4wiXj9NmEE

THE FOLLOWING REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS OF THE DISCUSSED FILM. READERS DISCRETION IS ADVISED.

When things get tough and you got a chance to shine, you don’t always need to Send Help.


PLOT


The 2026 film follows widowed Linda Liddle who works at a financial management company as strategist for the company’s Planning & Strategy Department. She is known to be socially awkward around others and that is what drives her boss’ son and new CEO Bradley Preston award a promotion to his friend Donovan and sideline her to a dead end role. Still impressed by her boldness however, he invites her to accompany him, Donovan (Xavier Samuel) and two other executives (Chris Pang & Aaron Shore) on a Bangkok business trip to finalize a company merger. The flight gets awkward when the men mock her audition tape for the reality competition series, Survivor, that shows her to be a survival enthusiast. It then goes tragic when the plane suffers engine failure and rapidly lose altitude during a storm. Donovan does try to take Linda’s seat and strangles her for it, but she defends herself and stabs him with a fork to push him off. She and Bradley reach a remote island in the Gulf of Thailand, but the latter is severely injured. She does build shelter and start securing food/water, but she teaches him a lesson by ditching him for two days when he still treats her like a subordinate. While still resentful, he still tries accepting her authority especially when she saves him from dehydration. She does catch fish and kill a boar to continue proving she’s adept at survival; When she spots a passing boat however, she avoids signaling it and doesn’t tell Bradley about it. As he slowly recovers, she does tell him to avoid the far side of the island, claiming to be full of poisonous plants. When they share homemade fruit wine one night, she opens up that her husband was an abusive drunk and allowed him to drive which led to his death. Bradley appears sentimental when hearing this and tries to change his ways by cooking for her. This becomes his chance to poison her with berries and leave her via makeshift raft, but is quickly swept by the waves. Out of pity, Linda saves him from drowning when she recovers and later retaliates by poisoning him with octopus toxin that temporarily paralyzes him; She uses it as a moment to threaten castration should he betray her again. Linda is then surprised again when Bradley’s fiancé Zuri arrives to rescue the man she loves. Not wanting to lose her newfound purpose, she kills her and her boat captain (Thaneth Warakulnukroh) on a cliffside. Bradley would find his fiancé’s body when hunting on his own; When he confronts Linda about it, she tries denying it but he picks up her lie and suspects she may have murdered her husband too in her past. This leads to them fighting each other so severely that she stabs him after he gouges her eye. Bradley escapes and reaches a beach house on the island’s far side. Linda catches up to him and admits she found it around the time she found the boat, feeling she wasn’t ready to leave; She broke in easily at the time and admits what she did to Zuri. She then holds him at gunpoint and Bradley does try getting the upper hand with a statue to get the gun, only to realize it wasn’t loaded. Linda finally kills him with a golf club upon his realization of the gun being empty. The film then cuts to an epilogue taking place a year after she eventually got off the island: Linda has become a public figure after identifying as sole survivor of the plane crash and has made a fortune of a best selling memoir set to get an adaptation. At a celebrity golf tournament, the film ends with her intending to write a self help book and gives advice for others to save themselves.


THOUGHTS


As many moviegoers have said, this is what you get when putting Misery and Cast Away in a blender. I can’t expect any less with Sam Raimi at the helm because this was the right amount of hellacious bonkers you want from him. With Bill Pope’s cinematography and Danny Elfman’s score, you straight feel all the animosity and constant tension. I mean you’re sure gonna feel it when seeing an opening plane crash, a boar getting slain, a nightmare jump-scare of a demon and an eye gouge. Through the chemistry of actors Rachel McAdams & Dylan O’Brien, the message is straight and clear from writers Mark Swift & Mark Shannon that there is high importance to treat everyone equally, especially in a corporate world because the decision to dismiss it and stick with misogyny will only continue the cycle of power corrupting both sides of those who do and don’t deserve it. This is the dynamic McAdams & O’Brien bring to the table as Linda & Bradley who are opposite sides of the coin throughout. The latter is inherited power from his late father and everything is handed to him to the point where you see that he doesn’t know how to do anything for himself. He’s actually part of the reason that the movie becomes partially hilarious the whole runtime is him having a lengthy comeuppance realizing the world doesn’t evolve around him. You’re either squirming or laughing over the castration threat as editor Bob Murawski makes you think Linda was actually going for it, when actually revealing she made an example out of a rat. Had he given any genuine respect in advance to her, he would’ve bettered his chances to survive but kept choosing to take advantage of her every chance he had. There’s definitely a domino effect of a scenario involving the raft he made. We know he could’ve tricked her for her help had he bothered asking and then still poison her later, but since she still saw the beach house first, she likely would’ve tricked him to make a more faulty instead of sturdy one he would’ve hoped for. Having said that, McAdams is amazing as Linda because this is a character who is finally in her comfort zone, in a vicinity where she can show diligence and epic resourcefulness to the point of where she takes advantage of using that to be just as ruthless to teach her boss a lesson. I mean you know she’s having the time of her life after killing that boar. Throughout their time on the island, she does pick up on how he respects her but isn’t willing to change no matter what she does, hence hesitating to signal the boat the moment she saw it. She chose to stay on the island longer because she wasn’t ready to lose that authority. She went through enough abuse with her husband, whether or not his death was an accident on her end, so it does back up she wasn’t gonna bare it anymore. The problem is she does become her own worst enemy when tying up loose ends via eliminating the innocent. It was definitely a relief that before the crash, Dennis Haysbert’s character Franklin, the company’s senior executive was the only other person at work to genuinely appreciate her work apart from Bradley’s dad. He is the reason why Bradley brings her along for the trip, but the real victim of the story was Zuri. Portrayed by Edyll Ismail, she was the one person who never worked at the company yet never looked down on Linda when she met her, not using her class as an excuse to change her ways. I mean she was actually happy to see her once she reached the island. And yet Linda chose to kill her because she knew she would’ve believed whatever lies Bradley would’ve said, thus refusing to take the risk of letting their reunion happen. It’s one of those moments where you get the why, but just can’t condone it. On top of that, everyone will get to believe her side of the story more since no one is gonna find the bodies of those she killed or find out she intentionally didn’t even save the work pitch before the crash, out of spite, having quite exponential luck none of it will come back to haunt her. She does give the right advice that you need to put in the effort to save yourself when cornered, but don’t do it with malice the way she did because it won’t make you difference from those who have oppressed you. In short, Send Help is another gem to Raimi’s filmography to being hellacious entertainment you expect from him. If that’s the kind of film you prefer, then it’s a no brainer you’ll dig this too.