Director Sam Raimi pulled off a miracle earlier this year. His new film Send Help opened in theaters in January. Send Help isn’t based on an existing IP or set in some already successful cinematic universe. It’s a completely original story starring actors with names people recognize — Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien — but they’re not so big that they can pull tons of people into theaters all by themselves.
It’s rare for a mid-budget movie like this to get made and promoted in Hollywood these days, and yet Send Help was a bona fide hit. It’s available to stream at home on Hulu, so you can see what all the fuss is about.
Why you should watch Send Help at home
You may have missed it in theaters, but you shouldn’t miss it entirely
Send Help stars McAdams as Linda Liddle, a hard-working corporate strategist with a secret passion for the TV series Survivor, to the point where she’s boned up on survivalism and even auditioned for the show. She’s expecting a long-promised promotion at work, only for her boss to hand the reigns of her company over to Bradley, (Dylan O’Brien), his preening, superficial, nepo baby brat of a son. Bradley immediately gives the job to his incompetent best friend and lets Linda know, essentially, that she’s not attractive enough to join him at the executive level.
Linda, who is painfully awkward and shy during the first parts of the movie, stands up for herself just a bit, which impresses Bradley enough for him to invite her on a business trip to Bangkok. The plane goes down during the trip, and Bradley and Linda wash up on a desert island as the only survivors. Bradley is injured, and Linda’s survival skills are now all that stands between them and death. The power dynamic shifts, and the battle is on.
The best thing about Send Help is its unpredictability. If you’ve seen other movies about a man and a woman stranded on a desert island, like Swept Away or Six Days, Seven Nights, you might think that Send Help is setting up some kind of enemies-to-lovers arc, where Linda and Bradley hate each other at first but come to appreciate when each brings to the table by the end. And the movie has enough edgy playful banter for you to keep thinking that right up until the point it becomes impossible. Because Send Help is directed by Sam Raimi, the man behind horror classics like Evil Dead and Drag Me to Hell, and he has something very different in mind.
Sam Raimi is in top form in Send Help
So is Rachel McAdams
In a way, Send Help continues 2025’s streak of great, successful horror movies, many of which were also original ideas. In another way, it feels wrong to call Send Help a horror movie since there’s no supernatural element; it’s just about two people who really, really come to hate each other. And that’s not a knock; Raimi, McAdams, and O’Brien are more than capable of holding our interest as things go from bad to worse to murderous. The always-dependable Danny Elfman helps out with a terrific score.
Our sympathy is definitely mostly with Linda, who is belittled at the start and who keeps both herself and Bradley alive in spite of his continued insistence that she’s still his employee and has to do what he says, even though their circumstances have drastically changed. But she’s not innocent, either. After the reality of their situation sinks in, she justifiably enjoys being the dominant one in the relationship, but she takes things a bit far in ways I won’t spoil here. In Send Help, there’s plenty of brutality and blame to go around.
Stylistically, Send Help will feel familiar to anyone who enjoys Raimi’s work. There’s lots of blood spraying all over the place, and some of the violence has an almost cartoon-like, Looney Tunes-esque slapstick quality to it that almost pushes the movie into the realm of camp. There’s plenty of comedy in the dialogue, too. “I’d kill for what’s on that plate!” the injured Bradley says as he looks at the freshly filleted fish Linda is holding on a palm leaf. “Yes, but then what would you do tomorrow?” she replies.
The movie never becomes so winking and knowing that it diminishes the central battle of wills between Linda and Bradley. McAdams is especially compelling as Linda, who sheds her slouching posture and downward glance from the early scenes to become a mad-eyed bird of prey in the latter ones. This movie is fun, funny, tense, and bloody. It’s a great watch. It runs for just under two hours and feels like half that.
Send Help sends help to movie theaters
Support mid-sized films
Beyond just being a good movie, which is reward enough in and of itself, Send Help is part of an ongoing revival story. Movie theaters have been on the ropes since the COVID pandemic, but 2026 feels like the year they finally bounce back. Everyone expects blockbusters like Project Hail Mary and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie to clean up at the box office, but there was no guarantee that a mid-budget horror movie like Send Help would be a hit. But with $94 million made on a budget of $40 million, it was. That’s important, because if exciting, original movies like Send Help do well at the box office, Hollywood will make more of them, and that’s good for everybody.
Of course, watching Send Help on streaming won’t help solve this particular ongoing issue, but it can’t hurt. Anyway, that encourages Sam Raimi to keep working is for the best.
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The horror continues
There are lots of other great horror movies to stream out there, plus some terrific horror TV shows if you want something that will keep you spooked for weeks or months. Drag Me to Hell, the last great original thriller that Raimi made before Send Help, is even available to watch for free on YouTube.
