Send Help: Sam Raimi Doesn’t Hate Romance, He Just Knows Where It Hurts

By Thom Ernst

Rating: B+

A Sam Raimi film that is truly a Sam Raimi film remains an occasion worth celebrating.

I’m talking about the Raimi that pops fully formed out of his skull with the sturdy, squared confidence of Bruce Campbell’s jaw. The Raimi of gleeful cruelty, flexible tension, and the insistence that laughter and terror are essentially the same reflex—just triggered differently.

Send Help is very much that kind of Raimi film.

Dylan O’Brien and Rachel McAdams in Send Help

A vicious, relentless dark comedy, the film takes the well-worn “unlikely duo forced to work together” premise and strips it down to the bone—then starts gnawing. Two people so diametrically opposed they barely seem to belong on the same planet, let alone marooned together on a deserted island, are forced into an escalating battle of survival, control, and psychological warfare. The hook is that one already believes they’ve won before the game has started, while the other is eager to prove them wrong.

The island itself is a paradise, at least on paper. There are fish to catch, fruit to eat, wild boar to hunt. Nature, indifferent but generous, provides just enough to keep the survivors alive—and just enough space for Raimi to show how quickly comfort curdles into hostility.

Rachel McAdams plays Linda Liddle. For the time being, Liddle (a name that feels aggressively intentional) has the upper hand. She’s practical, capable, and entirely unaware of how unbearable she is. Oblivious to her own lack of interpersonal skill, she tries too hard, misses the joke, misreads the room, and assumes proximity is permission for intimacy. She can’t read social signals, but she is phenomenal at surviving. She even has an audition tape ready for her favourite show, Survivor.

Raimi mercilessly milks Liddle’s incompetence, initially positioning it as though a grand comeuppance is inevitable. What begins as an awkward survival scenario slowly curdles into something sharper and meaner. Send Help isn’t interested in teamwork as redemption. It’s interested in endurance and in harvesting resentment. In seeing how quickly civility erodes once there’s no one left to perform it for.

What makes Send Help especially unsettling—even by Raimi standards—is how fluid the audience’s empathy becomes. Allegiances shift. Power changes hands. Sympathy is earned, squandered, and occasionally punished. Raimi toys with our expectations, never allowing us to settle comfortably on a favourite. No one here is particularly likeable—and if they are… well, it doesn’t last.

The film is essentially a two-hander between McAdams and Dylan O'Brien, and both lean hard into Raimi’s tonal gymnastics. As Linda Liddle, McAdams sheds her romantic image for a kind of mousy, eager incompetence that gradually reveals itself as something far more dangerous. As Bradley Preston, O’Brien weaponizes frat-boy arrogance, sniffing out weakness and exploiting it with the confidence of someone who has always assumed the world will eventually bend his way.

Their dynamic works precisely because it sabotages its own romantic-comedy potential at every turn. Any hint of meet-cute chemistry is viciously undercut by cruelty, fear, or blunt-force slapstick. This is Raimi reminding us that intimacy, under pressure, can be just another weapon.

And yes, Send Help is pure Raimi. His hand is unmistakable in set pieces involving a hostile office environment, a spectacular plane crash, and a pig hunt that ranks among the funniest—and most excessive—bursts of cartoon violence since Shaun of the Dead. Raimi has long championed escalation as comedy’s most reliable tool, especially when it’s also horrifying.

The convenient but entirely unnecessary act of placing Send Help within Raimi’s oeuvre would put it somewhere beyond A Simple Plan and The Gift, and before Drag Me to Hell. And yet there’s a strong argument that Raimi breaks new ground here, creating something that stands slightly apart from his previous work.

Comparisons beyond Raimi’s own films are inevitable. The most vivid is Rob Reiner’s Misery, with Kathy Bates’ Oscar-winning turn as a social misfit who suddenly finds purpose—and power—when placed in control. You could also make cases for Lord of the Flies, The War of the Roses, or just about any classic screwball pairing where affection and hostility exist in the same breath.

I suspect Send Help is the kind of film that plays even better on a second viewing, once expectations have been thoroughly dismantled. Raimi isn’t interested in comfort, morality plays, or lessons learned. He’s interested in watching audiences squirm as their loyalties are rearranged in real time.

The film also features Dennis Haysbert as Franklin, one of Liddle’s lone defenders, alongside Xavier Samuel and Chris Pang as her more blatant tormentors. Edyll Ismail appears as Zuri, Preston’s impossibly beautiful and devoted fiancée.

Send Help is about as far from a feel-good film as possible. But Raimi, once again, proves he still knows how to hurt you, and make you laugh while he’s doing it.

Send Help is directed by Sam Raimi and stars Rachel McAdams, Dylan O’Brien, Dennis Haysbert, Xavier Samuel, Chris Pang and Edyll Ismail. Send Help is currently playing in select theatres.