Film Reviews & Movie Analysis

From comedy-horror director Sam Raimi. When an underappreciated veteran employee is stranded on a desert island with her egoistic boss, the balance of power flips for better and for worse.

It’s not unusual for director Sam Raimi to take long breaks between projects, with Send Help releasing four years after Raimi’s last film, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Maddness (2022). After the restrictive confines of working on such a tightly leashed franchise, Send Help feels like a reset for the filmmaker: something smaller, weirder, and more controlled.

Going back to basics, the movie leans into a number of survival and horror tropes: isolation, psychological power shifts, the difficulty of survival, and the landscape as an antagonist. None of this hurts the film per se, but it does nothing to elevate it beyond a solid comedy-horror. There’s a heavy-handed but necessary reinforcement of flipped gender roles and shifting power dynamics through control. However, when your life is in someone else’s hands, the smallest act to teach you a lesson can in fact border on torture. In fact, there is an undercurrent of brutal romanticism that occasionally spikes, making the characters feel like they are in an abusive relationship with no way out.

Casting Rachel McAdams (who previously worked with Raimi on Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness) known for playing dependable, romantic, and emotionally grounding characters, makes her turn as a manic, relentlessly cheerful survivalist all the more unsettling. Her character’s determination to remain on the island and maintain the sense of control she lacks in her real life feels both absurd and oddly believable. Opposite her, Dylan O’Brien slips easily into the role of a nepo-baby “bro” boss, bringing just enough arrogance and desperation to make the power struggle darkly entertaining.

It’s in the movie’s denouncement that it truly separates itself. The ending pivots away from expectation and delivers the film’s most unsettling idea. It’s not the grotesque mirror it holds up to the things we’d do to survive; it’s the question, “Would we do bad things if we could get away with it scott-free?”

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