Send Help shows Sam Raimi should stick to horror, not more superhero films
In a Jan. 28, 2026 review for Polygon, the critic argues Sam Raimi’s new film Send Help proves he’s at his best outside the comic-book genre and should keep making original horror and thrillers rather than more superhero movies. The review notes that Raimi himself recently joked in a Reddit AMA that his biggest gripe about modern superheroes is “that they don’t offer me more of them!” but says Send Help demonstrates why the director’s distinct sensibilities work better on projects he can shape on his own terms.
Send Help stars Rachel McAdams as Linda Liddle, an overworked middle manager whose promised promotion is denied when her boss’s son Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien) elevates a frat-bro co-worker, Donovan (Xavier Samuel). A business trip turns into survival horror when the corporate jet crashes in the Pacific and only Linda and Bradley survive.
The review highlights Raimi’s trademark heightened acting, kinetic camerawork, and grotesque gore: a humiliating tuna-salad-on-the-face slow-motion beat, a Final Destination-like jet crash, a blood-soaked wild-boar hunt, a scene of a desperate Bradley eating a creature, and a castration moment that the critic says will make audiences squirm.
It frames Send Help as a Castaway-style survival thriller filtered through Raimi’s delirious, horror-rooted style (recalling Evil Dead and Drag Me to Hell) and contrasts that with his studio-era superhero work, including Spider-Man and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.
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