"Send Help" - Sam Raimi's Return to Body Horror

[the following review is spoiler-free]

Leave it to January of 2026 to suddenly upend every single previously conceived notion we’ve had about this month in the past. Jokingly coined Dumpuary in the past, January has historically been where movies in general (but for whatever reason, horror movies in particular) go to die a quick, unmemorable death. For a long period of pre-pandemic time, you could always bank on there being one reprehensibly bad PG13 to soft R-rated horror movie releasing in the first week of the year. In the past half decade however, things have shifted slightly. Movies have gotten a bit better, and the release schedule is more unpredictable. Case in point: the first horror release of this year, Nia DaCosta’s 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is absolutely fantastic, and despite it releasing so early, has a genuine shot at being in a fair amount of top 20 lists by the end of the year. And now before the month is over we also got Send Help! While it’s not as visually rich and consistently psychotic as his other works, there’s a lot more under the surface to chew on than something like Drag Me To Hell, or god forbid Oz The Great and Powerful. 

The film follows Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien as an employee/boss duo as they’re trapped on an island together after a plane crash and have to survive the elements. And shocker: they despise each other…or do they?

Send Help is Raimi’s first non-franchise film in almost 17 years, and while his signature quirky, over-the-top, goofball humor remains ever present within 3 minutes of the film starting, the horror elements are far more spread out in this entry. I saw fellow critic, Griffin Schiller coin this as Raimi’s take on Phantom Thread, and for what it’s worth, I couldn’t come up with a better comparison if I tried. The first act of the film is chock full of more than your fair share of awkward humor, and standardly staged, and admittedly kinda visually bland conversations. There’s a couple of quirky edits here and there, but for the most part, the first half hour of the film is pretty standard stuff. 

Once the island portion takes hold though, the film really starts to rear its head. McAdams and O’Brien are absolutely fantastic together, but also just as individual performers. They both have moments here where they have to shine by themselves on the screen, and they more than live up to the task. Their relationship goes in many different directions that you wouldn’t expect, and each one I found more interesting than the last. 

The horror and violence that you would expect from a Raimi film are most definitely there, but they are far from the main focus. The second act on a first viewing could definitely be interpreted tediously, as there are more than a couple repetitive sequences that take a while to reveal their purpose. Also, the purposefully cheesy CGI doesn’t always look that purposefully cheesy sometimes. 

With all of that said, there is a third act reveal that totally blew my socks off. The last half hour of the film is what I thought the whole thing was going to be like, and so that probably has something to do with my general uneasiness on the second act of the film, however, once I realized what they were actually trying to do, I was retroactively on board with pretty much all of it. There are still elements to the second act that in retrospect, I think should have been way more committed to the bit, but I still think it more than stuck the landing. 

We get a new original score by the maestro Danny Elfman, and as usual it is funny, frightening, suspenseful, and classically Raimi. Every classic violin squeal had me kicking my feet like a kid on Christmas morning. 

I could see this being pretty divisive amongst the general public. My screening was public, and there were a lot of disgusted grunts at stuff in the movie, which by Raimi standards is actually pretty tame, even taking his PG-13 work into account. Also a lot of the bits that I found to be the funniest in the film (one match cut in the final few minutes being a genuine all timer), no one else really seemed to jive with. It may not be violent enough for Raimi superfans, and it may be too much for people that want to watch Dylan O’Brien naked on a beach. Who knows? I certainly wish it went a bit further with the genre elements, but the character work we get in lieu of that stuff I found surprisingly and deeply substantive. In a time where all of the horror films about codependency and toxic relationships are depressing, existential nightmare fuel, this one was a genuine romp. See it on a first date. What could go wrong?