SEND HELP
Genre: Horror, Comedy
Directed by: Sam Raimi
Starring: Rachel McAdams, Dylan O’Brein
Release Date: January 30th, 2026
Platform: Theatrical
Rating: 4.5/5
By Stephen Lackey
“It’s silly, it’s gross, and it’s glorious.”
When SEND HELP works, it works because Sam Raimi is finally allowed to be Sam Raimi again. Not “polished prestige Raimi.” Not “IP-friendly Raimi.” This is homemade Raimi. The duct-taped, camera-whipping, fluids-everywhere Raimi who treats the edit bay like a playground and the lens like it owes him money.
Despite being a studio film, SEND HELP feels gloriously slapped together in the best way. The editing and camera work are borderline zany, oscillating between 1970s grindhouse horror and The Three Stooges getting mauled by circumstance. Whip pans snap your neck. Fast zooms crash in like an Italian western having a nervous breakdown. Cuts land on jokes with zero shame. Raimi dumps his entire toolbox onto the table and somehow nothing feels indulgent. Even the bodily fluids, vomit, blood, and other splashy Raimi essentials are deployed with surgical comedic timing. This is slapstick horror, but with intention.
The script is lean to the point of aggression. No mythology bloat. No fake elevation. The premise is blunt: a terrible boss and the brilliant employee he wants to discard end up stranded together on an island. Power dynamics flip immediately. That’s the movie. And it’s enough. There’s more going on, sure, but SEND HELP understands that discovery beats explanation every time. Raimi doesn’t overthink the situation; he weaponizes it.
Rachel McAdams absolutely owns this thing. She commits to the silliness with terrifying confidence, toggling effortlessly between awkward, cringey, hilarious, and quietly intimidating. She’s playing the joke and the threat at the same time, which is harder than it looks, and she nails it. Dylan O’Brien wisely doesn’t try to match her scene-chewing energy. Instead, he perfects the art of the loathsome boss—smarmy, cowardly, and blessed with a near-iconic laugh that’s funny enough to make you chuckle and irritating enough to make you hope something terrible happens to him. Their comedic timing together is razor sharp. A film with so few characters is challenging because regardless of the quality of the actual filmmaking, it ultimately fails or succeeds on the performances of the two leads because there’s no ensemble to hide behind. In this case, the film is a rousing success.
This is not elevated horror. It doesn’t want to be. SEND HELP exists in that beautifully uncomfortable Raimi space where it’s either too funny to satisfy horror purists or too gross to qualify as a straight comedy. That’s familiar territory for him, and it’s where he thrives. He’s been walking this line since The Evil Dead and Drag Me To Hell, and SEND HELP feels like a reminder that this messy, gleeful, handcrafted chaos is the point.
It’s silly, it’s gross, and it’s glorious. SEND HELP is precise, and it feels like a director playing with his toys again—blood-splattered, joyfully unhinged toys. The only fault I find in the film is its painfully generic title, which ultimately has a point, and a scant few minutes in the middle of the film that drag just a little but honestly, this is all just nitpicking on a film that is a joy to behold.
