Send Help movie review: Rachel McAdams elevates Sam Raimi’s twisty survival thriller | Movie-review News
3 min readJan 30, 2026 01:45 PM IST
Send Help Movie Review: Rachel McAdams is one of those faces, with its dimples and a megawatt smile, that invites you to let your guard down.
That is precisely what you can’t do in this latest Sam Raimi film, described as a “survival horror”, but which is much more than that.
Better still, you can’t put your finger on exactly what it’s about, right till the very end, with McAdams lending her character Linda Liddle a quicksilver quality that keeps blindsiding.
We meet her as this mousy but pivotal cog in the wheel of a Fortune 500 company. So mousy that her obnoxious boss Bradley (O’Brien) doesn’t bother remembering even her department. As McAdams keeps correcting, she is not “Linda from Accounting”, but “Linda from Strategy and Planning”. But she is pivotal enough that when he has overlooked her for the promised vice-president post, to give it to one of his buddies, Bradley must throw Linda a lucrative bone as compensation.
That compensation, of joining Bradley and others on a trip to Hong Kong for a merger, upturns the power dynamics of this one-way relationship. On way, somewhere in the waters off Thailand, Bradley’s chartered plane crashes. After his buddies, who have spent the flight mocking Linda in plain sight — particularly an audition video she had made for TV show Survivor — kill each other in a desperate scramble to save themselves, Linda wakes up to find herself on a desolate beach.
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The only other survivor of the plane is Bradley — of course. And the tables are turned — of course. For a while you do roll your eyes at this “of course” trajectory of the film where Linda’s superior skills of living in the wild trump Bradley’s silver-spooned existence at every turn. Linda can fashion a shelter, make fire, collect clean water, catch food from fish to snails, mash herbs for a lotion of sorts, devise a hamper as well as a grass hat and a wicker backpack and a wind chime of shells, and even hunt a boar in a scene that is pure guttural glory.
Reluctantly, Bradley must admit he is beat.
But how deep goes Linda’s triumph? You have to watch this to figure that out.
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McAdams gets a film that lets all aspects of her shine, without no distractions of any sort; all women exasperated with playing nice and “looking nice” to bosses get their day in the sun (and sand); and all men are shown how defenceless they are not wearing the pants (literally in one scene).
Certainly, no man is an island. Women, though? Try asking.
Send Help movie cast: Rachel McAdams, Dylan O’Brien
Send Help movie director: Sam Raimi
Send Help movie rating: 3 stars
