Send Help: Rachel McAdams Movie Review 2025

If you’ve ever fantasized about telling your terrible boss exactly where to stick that “urgent” weekend email while stranded on a desert island with nothing but a sharpened stick and a grudge, Send Help is the cinematic therapy session you didn’t know you needed.

Sam Raimi’s gloriously unhinged return to R-rated horror-comedy territory isn’t just a movie—it’s a blood-splattered middle finger to toxic workplace culture, and Rachel McAdams delivers the kind of performance that makes you want to stand up and slow-clap in the theater.

The Setup: Office Hell Meets Actual Hell

McAdams plays Linda Liddle, a mousy corporate strategist who’s basically kept her financial services firm afloat while her golf-obsessed male colleagues steal the credit and mock her “bad hair” (their words, not ours). When the company founder dies and his failson Bradley (Dylan O’Brien, dripping with frat-boy slime) inherits the throne, Linda’s promised VP promotion evaporates faster than you can say “nepotism.” Instead, Bradley gives the gig to one of his old fraternity bros who literally just joined the company. Classic.

But here’s where Send Help takes a hard left into Crazytown: Bradley, realizing Linda’s actual value, drags her on a private jet to Thailand for a merger meeting. The plane hits turbulence. The plane hits the ocean. Suddenly, our girl Linda is swimming toward a deserted island while her useless colleagues scream like they’re in a 1950s horror comic—because, well, they are.

Rachel McAdams: From Mean Girl to Survivor Queen

Remember when McAdams ruled high school as Regina George? In Send Help, she’s playing the exact opposite—a woman who’s been stepped on her entire life—but with that same razor-sharp commitment to chaos. Turns out Linda is a *Survivor* superfan who actually sent in an audition tape and has read every “how to not die in the woods” book ever published. So while Bradley washes ashore with a gnarly leg injury and zero practical skills, Linda is already building shelters, starting fires, and hunting wild boar like she’s auditioning for her own Discovery Channel show.

McAdams doesn’t just play Linda—she transforms into her. Stringy hair? Check. Antisocial quirks (like eating tuna fish at her desk)? Double check. A “glow up” that defies the laws of nature and grooming? Oh, you better believe it. Dropping a full-blown movie star into a role that demands “humiliation, restraint, and a willingness to look foolish” can backfire spectacularly. But here? It’s a multiplying factor, and McAdams’ star power doesn’t flatten **Send Help**—it electrifies it.

She maneuvers all those swerves with singular aplomb. Rarely has a mainstream entertainment played such amusing tricks with our sympathies. She begins nice. She turns nasty. She is most engaging at her most appalling. Quite a trick.

Sam Raimi: Back in His Evil Dead Bag

Let’s be real—we’ve missed this version of Sam Raimi. The one who made Drag Me to Hell and the original *Spider-Man* trilogy before getting sucked into the Marvel machine. Send Help is his first R-rated feature in over two decades, and he’s clearly been saving up all his gross-out ideas like a twisted treasure chest.

This is vintage Raimi: rapid-fire camera zooms, cartoonishly daring visuals, and what may be his finest puke gag since Drag Me to Hell (yes, really). The violence is sharp, and the comedy is clean, with Raimi observing his world’s details with a hunter’s precision. It’s got the gruesome ingenuity of *The Evil Dead* fused with the pop-comic precision that made his superhero films revolutionary. Ghastly without being grim, morally queasy without being mean—Send Help knows exactly where to draw its line in the sand. Or, in this case, its line in the tropical beach blood.

The Dynamic: A Two-Hander That Keeps You Guessing

Dylan O’Brien deserves serious credit for making Bradley more than just a one-dimensional villain. Sure, he’s an insufferable nepo baby who thinks “people skills” and golf handicap are valid job qualifications, but O’Brien finds genuine depth in the character’s desperation. As the power dynamics shift—Bradley healing, Linda potentially losing her grip—the film becomes a psychological chess match where both players are willing to flip the board and beat each other with it.

The script by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift (*Freddy vs. Jason*, because of course) keeps throwing curveballs every other scene. Just when you think you’ve figured out who to root for, Send Help pulls the rug out again. The stuff these two do to each other will long be remembered in the annals of horrific castaway thrillers.

Is Send Help perfect? Nah. The CGI occasionally looks like it escaped from a Syfy original movie, and if you’re squeamish about bodily fluids (so, so many bodily fluids), you might want to sit this one out. The final twist is telegraphed enough that only the weak of mind won’t guess what’s coming—though honestly, who cares when the journey is this much fun?

What Send Help gets absolutely right is the catharsis. This is a film for anyone who’s ever been overlooked, underpaid, or told they “just don’t have it” by someone who got their job through daddy’s connections. Watching Rachel McAdams go from office doormat to island warrior queen is the kind of transformation that makes you want to pump your fist in the air—and maybe update your resume.

With a thumping Danny Elfman score, lush cinematography by Bill Pope that leans into the unreality, and two lead performances that are fully committed to the bit, Send Help is exactly the kind of mid-budget, risk-taking studio movie we keep saying Hollywood doesn’t make anymore. Turns out they do—they just need Sam Raimi and Rachel McAdams to go absolutely feral to pull it off.

Final Score: ★★★★☆ (4/5)

Send Help is in theaters now. Bring a strong stomach, a sense of humor, and maybe don’t watch it right before your next performance review.