2026's Most Surprising Horror Hit Is Finally Streaming

Depending on what generation you’re in, you probably know Sam Raimi either as the creator of the Evil Dead series or as the director of the Spider-Man movies with Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst from the early ‘00s. (Or maybe both.) Either way, his standalone films are also very much worth a look — especially now that his latest, Send Help, is available on streaming.

Send Help was something of a surprise hit earlier this year. Released in January—traditionally a dumping ground for the movie studios would prefer not to get too much publicity—the film defied both industry predictions and a snowstorm that buried much of the Northeastern U.S. to make a solid $19 million at the domestic box office in its opening weekend. That’s since grown to $94 million worldwide, thanks to good reviews from critics and strong word of mouth.

I heard quite a bit of buzz around Send Help when it opened in theaters earlier this year, much of it along the lines of, “it’s actually really good!” (Blame the January dump.) And it did not disappoint, featuring a strong original script from another unlikely source—Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, best known for writing the 2009 Friday the 13th reboot. It’s been nearly a decade since Shannon and Swift had a screenplay produced in Hollywood, and the writing in Send Help is excellent, mean and funny and unpredictable as it plays with the audience’s expectations.

Fans of the director’s work will also be pleased to know that there are quite a few Raimi-isms in here as well: At one point, the director even utilizes the famous “demon cam” from The Evil Dead as a wild boar chases Rachel McAdams around the jungle before she stabs it in the heart with a piece of broken wood.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. McAdams stars in the movie as Linda Liddle, an analyst at an anonymous mega-corporation who’s good with numbers, but not much else. She dresses like a kindergarten teacher from the ’70s, eats smelly tuna-fish sandwiches at her desk, and can barely hold eye contact when she’s having a conversation with her coworkers. (It might be difficult to imagine McAdams this way, but that’s the power of acting.)

So it seems like a mean prank when the company’s new CEO—and son of the former CEO—Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brian) invites Linda along on a business trip to Thailand, promising her a promotion if she can finalize an important deal. It is supposed to be a prank, but Bradley and his frat-boy cronies are interrupted before they can pull it off. And by “interrupted,” I mean “sucked out of the depressurized cabin to drown in an angry sea,” which is what happens when the company’s plane crashes amid a violent storm over the Gulf of Thailand.

Linda and Bradley are the only survivors.

Soon after, they wash up on the white-sand beach of a beautiful, but extremely remote island. As it turns out, Linda has been training for something like this for years (technically, she was training to audition for Survivor, but whatever), and she takes to life on the island like a tropical fish to clear waters. Bradley, meanwhile, has an injured leg, and wouldn’t know how to feed himself if he didn’t. Still, this arrogant nepo baby tries—and fails—to survive without his underpaid underling, before admitting defeat in a comedic scene that will be extremely satisfying to anyone who’s ever had to cover for their boss in a meeting.

The push-and-pull of the characters’ dynamic is gripping. At first, Linda is portrayed as a victim, but as we learn more about her—her shady past, the way she clearly enjoys her power over Bradley—her actions start to take on a different, more sinister cast. And although he somehow manages to still be obnoxious and entitled even after nearly dying of sun exposure because he didn’t know how to build a lean-to, Bradley is also a more nuanced character than he appears to be at first. Their power struggle is full of surprises and intrigue—some of which the audience is in on, and some of which we are not.

All of this is told in Raimi’s signature cartoonishly violent style, which combines laughs and gore, often in the same shot. O’Brien is perfectly hatable as Bradley, but it’s McAdams who’s the real draw here: Her performance as Linda blurs the line between plucky and demented, slowly shifting from sympathetic to sadistic until she’s pumping Bradley full of neurotoxins and threatening to castrate him. Even so, she’s a character to root for, in her own twisted way. How else are you going to get someone from the C-suite to listen to your ideas?

Send Help is now streaming on Hulu.