Send Help (2026)

Sam Raimi has built a career on the cheerful dismemberment of good taste, and Send Help finds him on familiar ground: a plane crash, a desert island, and two colleagues who would each prefer the other drowned. Rachel McAdams plays Linda Liddle, a corporate strategist passed over for promotion by her late boss's son, who explains that her face and her manner make her unsuitable for leadership. That insult is the engine of the entire picture. What follows is a survival contest staged as a gender war, with the office hierarchy inverted one humiliation at a time. The film is not subtle about its grievance, and it does not need to be. The grievance is the plot.

The screenplay has other targets in its sights, though it treats them as seasoning. Corporate nepotism, fraternity-bro executive culture, and the modern habit of converting personal catastrophe into a memoir and a self-help brand all take their lumps. The critique colors the comedy without ever hardening into a thesis. The supporting cast includes Dennis Haysbert, Edyll Ismail, and Chris Pang, and they are simply present, doing their jobs, with no casting statement attached. Race is never a subject here. Neither is climate, nor body image, nor neurodivergence, despite a heroine described as socially awkward. Those aisles are empty.

Which leaves the question of tone. Raimi stages his themes instead of announcing them. The violence is comic, the morality is murky, and the audience is invited to root for a woman who has done genuinely appalling things. Nobody lectures. The final aphorism about saving yourself arrives as a punchline about the self-help industry, not a lesson. It is a nasty, efficient machine, and it never once mistakes itself for a sermon.