Send Help Movie (2026): Complete Recap & Ending Explained

Sam Raimi’s Send Help marks a glorious, blood-soaked return to the director’s signature brand of nasty, mean-spirited horror-comedy, stepping away from the massive superhero blockbusters to deliver a remarkably vicious social satire.

Anchored by a career-best, spectacularly unhinged performance from Rachel McAdams and a wonderfully pathetic turn by Dylan O’Brien, the film operates as a spiritual successor to Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell, while channeling the blistering class critiques of Triangle of Sadness.

It is a masterclass in shifting audience sympathies, taking the familiar trope of the deserted island survival story and mutating it into a terrifying examination of how absolute power corrupts absolutely, especially when placed in the hands of someone who has been powerless their entire life.

Recap

The film introduces us to Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams), a meek, incredibly capable, but socially agonizing corporate strategist who spends her days eating smelly tuna sandwiches at her desk and being entirely invisible to her colleagues.

She has dedicated her life to her company, eagerly awaiting a promised promotion from the late founder. However, when the founder’s son, Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien), a textbook, chauvinistic nepo baby takes over as CEO, he immediately gives Linda’s promised Vice President position to his underqualified fraternity brother.

To add insult to injury, Bradley plans to transfer Linda to a dead-end role, dragging her along on a business trip to Bangkok just to humiliate her further by playing her clumsy, unaired audition tape for the reality show Survivor to the rest of the executives mid-flight.

The corporate humiliation is violently interrupted when the private plane encounters a catastrophic storm over the Pacific.

A massive explosive decompression event sucks the cruel executives out of the fuselage, including one who gets brutally strangled by his own necktie leaving only Linda and Bradley secured in their seats as the plane plunges into the ocean.

When the wreckage settles, Linda washes ashore on a remote, uninhabited island in the Gulf of Thailand, soon discovering that Bradley is the only other survivor, though his leg has been severely mutilated in the crash.

In the real world, Bradley held all the cards, utilizing his inherited wealth and status to crush Linda’s ambitions.

On the island, however, the currency of power completely changes. Bradley is entirely useless, physically incapacitated, and devoid of any practical skills. Linda, on the other hand, is a hardcore survivalist fanatic. She applies the obsessive knowledge she gleaned from Survivor to build shelter, forage for food, and purify water.

Initially, Bradley attempts to maintain their corporate hierarchy, barking orders and demanding she focus on signaling for rescue.

Linda responds by simply walking away, leaving him to wither from dehydration for two days. When she finally returns to offer him water, the unspoken realization sets in: Linda is now the CEO of their existence, and Bradley is entirely at her mercy.

As weeks turn into months, Linda begins to actively enjoy her new reality. Her dull, fluorescent-lit demeanor gives way to a glowing, confident, and increasingly tyrannical persona.

She controls the food supply, psychologically dominates Bradley, and even physically threatens him at one point paralyzing him with octopus toxin and performing a mock castration after he clumsily attempts to poison her to steal her raft.

The island becomes Linda’s twisted utopia, a place where her skills are finally recognized, and she holds absolute authority over the physical manifestation of the patriarchy that ruined her career.

The Ending Explained

The final act of Send Help accelerates from a tense psychological thriller into an outright slasher, revealing just how far Linda is willing to go to protect the sick fantasy world she has constructed.

The illusion of their isolation shatters when a boat arrives carrying Bradley’s fiancée, Zuri, and a hired local captain. Zuri refused to give up the search and tracked the crash trajectory.

For a normal person, this is salvation; for Linda, this is a hostile corporate takeover. Recognizing that returning to civilization means returning to her miserable, invisible life at the bottom of the ladder, Linda greets Zuri warmly, offering to lead her to Bradley.

Instead, she deliberately guides Zuri and the captain to a treacherous, rocky cliffside. In a moment of chillingly casual violence, Linda pushes them both to their deaths, deciding that maintaining her power is worth the price of cold-blooded murder.

When Bradley eventually discovers Zuri’s severed arm washed up on the beach, he realizes Linda’s horrifying betrayal and flees to a forbidden section of the island. Here, Raimi drops a massive narrative bombshell: Bradley discovers a fully stocked, modern luxury vacation mansion hidden in the foliage.

Linda had found this house months earlier but kept it a secret from Bradley, using its pristine kitchen knives and supplies to effortlessly orchestrate her “survival god” persona while forcing Bradley to sleep in the dirt.

Linda tracks Bradley to the mansion, leading to a brutal, blood-drenched, hand-to-hand fight that destroys the pristine vacation home. Desperate, Bradley attempts to manipulate Linda’s lingering desire for affection, begging for his life and claiming he has fallen in love with her and wants to stay on the island together forever.

He uses this distraction to grab a shotgun off the wall, turning it on her with a triumphant sneer, only to discover Linda had already emptied the chamber. Having proven that he will never truly respect her, Linda grabs a golf club from the wall, a deliberate callback to the elite, exclusionary corporate bro-culture Bradley represented and viciously beats him to death.

The film then executes a brilliant, cynical match-cut, jumping forward one year in time. Linda is standing on a pristine, sun-drenched golf course.

We learn that she eventually built her own raft, signaled for help, and returned to civilization. However, she completely fabricated her story, telling the world that she was the sole survivor of the plane crash.

She has parlayed this harrowing “true story” into a multi-million-dollar empire, becoming a celebrity, a bestselling self-help author, and a wealthy executive.

The brilliance of Send Help lies in its deeply pessimistic view of corporate ladder-climbing. Linda does not learn a valuable lesson about humanity, nor does she dismantle the toxic system that oppressed her.

Instead, she realizes that the only way to win in a capitalist, dog-eat-dog world is to become the very monster she initially despised.

By beating Bradley to death with a golf club and subsequently taking up the sport as a wealthy elite, she symbolically consumes his identity. She achieves her dream of wealth, power, and recognition, but only by entirely shedding her morality, leaving the audience with the terrifying realization that they just spent two hours rooting for the birth of a psychopath.

Review

Rating: ★★★★☆ (4/5)

Sam Raimi triumphantly returns to his gruesome, campy roots with a pitch-black survival satire that thrives on Rachel McAdams’ feral, career-best performance.

The absolute beating heart of Send Help is the incredibly toxic, constantly evolving dynamic between Rachel McAdams’ Linda Liddle and Dylan O’Brien’s Bradley Preston, both of whom commit entirely to the absolute absurdity of their changing circumstances.

McAdams, shedding her usual approachable charm, delivers an absolute tour-de-force as a socially agonizing, overlooked corporate strategist who transforms from a meek, tuna-eating cubicle dweller into a terrifyingly competent, Amazonian survivalist god.

Her transition is both hilarious and deeply unsettling, forcing the audience to grapple with their initial desire to root for her as she leans further into psychopathic authoritarianism.

Opposite her, O’Brien has the incredibly difficult task of playing a thoroughly detestable, useless nepotism baby who must somehow remain compelling even when stripped of all his unearned wealth and power.

O’Brien perfectly captures the frantic, pathetic desperation of a man who realizes his entire worldview is entirely useless in the face of nature, and the friction between his sheer incompetence and Linda’s hyper-fixated Survivor fandom creates a deliciously dark comedic engine that drives the entire narrative forward.

Behind the camera, Sam Raimi gleefully unleashes decades of pent-up, chaotic energy, utilizing his trademark kinetic cinematography, uncomfortable extreme close-ups, and a staggering amount of bodily fluids to craft a film that feels inherently, unmistakably his own.

While the corporate setup in the first act is visually sterile by design, the moment the plane violently crashes into the ocean, Raimi and cinematographer Bill Pope let the camera leap to life with manic, handheld long takes and dizzying angles that evoke the scrappy, go-for-broke spirit of the original Evil Dead films.

Raimi is not particularly interested in delivering a subtle, nuanced morality play about the patriarchy; instead, he uses the thematic underpinnings of workplace misogyny as a springboard for flying ropes of blood, projectile vomiting, and brutal, slapstick-infused violence.

While some of the digital effects utilized to bring the island’s wildlife to life such as the infamous, gruesome wild boar sequence can occasionally feel a bit unpolished or overtly artificial, this slight wonkiness almost adds to the cartoonish, Looney Tunes-esque heightened reality that Raimi so clearly wants to establish.