Send Help (2026) - Spoilers Abound!

A movie directed by Sam Raimi, written by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, and produced by Sam Raimi and Zainab Azizi, about two office workers who get stranded on an island off the gulf of Thailand- a low ranking desk jockey, favored by the previous CEO for her work ethic, stranded with her new boss- the stuck-up and spoiled kid of the previous CEO. The woman, Linda Liddle played by Rachel McAdams, works hard and well & has a deep adoration for Survivor and does a lot of extreme hiking. The man, Bradley Preston played by Dylan O'Brien, is highly spoiled and spurns Linda's impending promotion promised by his deceased father TO Linda for his frat bro, and finds Linda "disgusting". Too bad the plane freaking explodes on the way to a merger in Bangladesh. Really fun idea for a thriller!

This movie is also fucking gross. The CGI is cheesy as all hell, but in a way that compliments the film's tone- playful, comical, yet deeply, seriously, dangerous. The amount of fake blood is great, the jumpscares nearly made me cry- the airplane scene is particularly rough, honestly- and the push-and-pull between Linda and Bradley especially during the climax had me on the edge of my seat! There's a Patrick Bateman pastiche, the aforementioned frat bro Donovan played by Xavier Samuel- he seems deliberately styled to look quite a bit like Mr. Bateman of American Psycho fame, and it's very entertaining when he dies comically via being choked out by his tie after trying to rip Linda out of her seat during the plane crash. Sorry, Donny-boy...

Linda's heel-turn is so deeply interesting, the way she manipulates Bradley hits a fever pitch when she paralyzes him via poisonous squid and fools him into believing she castrated him! Which, while that happens, she says some crazy cissexist shit-- the usual prattle about his "biological" reasons he fell to toxic masculinity, then she stabs a dead rat for a dramatic blood spray. This is followed up by Bradley's fiance, Zuri played by Edyll Ismail, finding Linda when she takes a walk later. Linda's gears start turning about how to get out of being found out, and she leads them to a cliff so Zuri falls, the rescue boat captain played by Thaneth Warakulnukroh tries to pull her up and Linda finds the biggest rock she can & hits him over the head so he and Zuri fall to their deaths. My jaw positively dropped... and then my gears started turning.

Now, I want to say that I did go into it wondering if it would have some kind of white cishet feminist flavoring, but the way it showed those elements shocked me! Linda, a white woman, quickly and eagerly took the role of power from Bradley, the white man, just to use it to torture him just as he abused his role over others. It was a position of power so overwhelming yet desired that she was quite willing to kill his Indian fiance and an unrelated non-white man just to ensure she can keep it... It was chilling, and a reminder that white women, and white non-binaries, are not immune to the abusive power fantasies white men frolick in. Uh, in my opinion, anyway. Honestly I think that might be giving them too much credit, but horror is chock full of commentary on society...! Who knows.

Unfortunately for Linda, Bradley discovers his fiance's hand in the sand, her engagement ring still prominent and easily recognizable. Then Bradley and Linda finally become equals, for a moment of one-on-one brutality, beating the shit out of each other until Linda corners him in a vacation home on the other side of the island. At that point she knows she's won, and after Bradley tries unsuccessfully to sway her out of killing him... she offs him with a golf club.

The movie's ending was so shocking that I laughed harder than I have in some time. Linda not only gets away with killing both of those people, she got away with killing Bradley! And became the new CEO, AND became a celebrity!!!!!! She's even seen playing golf, something she did NOT enjoy before! Now that was funny- she quickly and eagerly lapped up far more than she was owed in the end, and named her self help book "No Help Is Coming" about how she was the only survivor of the plane crash, despite her body count and the mess she left behind. Lol.

The parallels to Survivor were SO fun. She really played Among Us out there. Gatekept. Gaslit. Girlbossed. Not in a good way though. 8/10.