Send Help Review: A Beach Break in Hell

Sam Raimi may be the world’s greatest raisin soup chef.

That’s the term Steven Spielberg coined for his early flop, 1941. A bizarre riff on wartime comedies, it just had too many disparate elements that may be fine apart but shouldn’t go together – kind of like raisin soup.

It’s almost impossible to get the recipe right. Ari Aster tried, and served a steaming bowl of Beau Is Afraid, but for Raimi the rich mix of incongruous tastes, of pratfall comedy, gross-out sight gags, a giddy sense of cruelty, and name actors debasing themselves for the story, is his signature recipe. He varies the recipe – sometimes more raisins, sometimes soupier – but that’s his specialty.

All those elements are on display in Send Help, his new twisted workplace comedy with his Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness star Rachel McAdams and Love and Monsters’ Dylan O’Brien, and scripted by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift. She’s Linda Liddle, the office nerd, and he’s Brad, her new sexist pig of a boss whose first act on his first day on the job is to pass her over for the promotion his father promised her. However, the tables are turned when they become marooned on a desert island, and Linda can use all those handy bush skills she picked up staying home and watching Survivor.

There are so many ways that this setup could play out: a survival horror, a modern riff on Hell in the Pacific, a Garson Kanin-esque screwball comedy, a Nora Ephron-style rom-com, a Jackass-inspired series of sight gags. Raimi does them all as Send Help vaults between genres, forcing McAdams and O’Brien to constantly reinvent their characters. O’Brien, who has been turning heads for his recent performance in Twinless, is at his best when Brad has some depth, but in turn McAdams becomes an avatar for Raimi’s Looney Tunes instincts.

That’s where Raimi shows his sadistic streak. For some, it’s going to be merely cartoonish, but when you’re already dealing with two unlikable characters, it’s merely witnessing bad things happening to bad people, with Raimi just out of frame, cackling to himself. It’s the same cruel streak that has underpinned M. Night Shayamalan’s more recent films, although Raimi is not weighed down by the Old director’s Hitchcockian pretensions.

Instead, Raimi is making big live-action cartoons with ghoulish and gooey streaks. He relishes turning the audience’s stomach, whether it be more vomit than a Farrelly brothers flick or a scene of extreme bug eating. It’s oddly juvenile and suggests that when Raimi does his big studio for-hire work, he’s merely restraining those instincts, not growing as a filmmaker. It’s like Peter Jackson kept churning out Meet the Feebles sequels, which would be fine, but it feels creatively stunted.

Much as with Drag Me to Hell, there’s a disturbing subtext about ambitious women in the workplace – a workplace that is only distinguishable from every 1980s Wall Street cliche of cubicles and suspenders by the presence of modern computer monitors. The superficial sheen of feminism is undercut by Linda shifting from greasy geek to beachfront hottie to manipulative monster. Raimi plays with the audience’s loyalties, making the insufferable Brad increasingly sympathetic and Linda more unhinged and despicable by the minute. Yet ultimately Send Help devolves into two awful people being awful to each other for two hours.

It’s all so very much what one could expect from Raimi when he doesn’t have a strong studio hand keeping him in check. If you like his signature raisin soup, Send Help will be a gut buster. But it really seems like this latest batch has started to curdle.

Send Help

2026, R, 113 min. Directed by Sam Raimi. Starring Rachel McAdams, Dylan O’Brien, Dennis Haysbert, Xavier Samuel, Edyll Ismail, Emma Raimi.

⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 2.5 out of 5.

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