The Evil Dead director’s long-awaited return to horror hits streaming today, and Rachel McAdams delivers what might be the performance of her career
Sam Raimi is back where he belongs — in the dirt, the dark, and the deeply uncomfortable — and as of today, you can watch him work without leaving your sofa.
Send Help, Raimi’s first horror film since Drag Me to Hell in 2009, began streaming on Hulu this morning. Seventeen years is a long time to hold your breath. Horror fans have been waiting through two Spider-Man films, a Doctor Strange sequel, and years of development limbo for the man who gave us the Evil Dead trilogy and Drag Me to Hell to come home. He has. And he’s brought Rachel McAdams with him, who delivers what several critics are already calling the best performance of her career.
After earning nearly $94 million at the global box office and landing a 93% rating on Rotten Tomatoes from its theatrical run in January — a genuinely extraordinary result for a January release, a slot Hollywood traditionally reserves for films it has given up on — Send Help is now accessible to everyone. In the UK and internationally, it lands on Disney+. For US subscribers, it’s on Hulu now. There is no longer any reason to have missed this film.
The setup is deceptively simple. Linda Liddle (McAdams) is a corporate strategist who has been quietly carrying her company for years, perpetually passed over for the promotion she deserves. When the job she’s owed goes instead to Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien) — the entitled, thoroughly unqualified son of her former boss — she’s forced to sit across from him on a work trip overseas. Then their plane goes down over the Gulf of Thailand. They’re the only survivors. And the island has no org chart.
What follows is one of the most precise and pleasurable pieces of genre filmmaking in recent memory. Raimi, working from a script by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift — the duo behind Freddy vs. Jason, which is exactly as relevant to the tone here as it sounds — takes the bones of a workplace revenge comedy and drags them through the jungle, the mud, and eventually somewhere far darker. The film operates in a space between Misery, Triangle of Sadness and 9 to 5 filtered through the sensibility of someone who once made a man get slapped to death by their own severed hand. The power inversion isn’t just satisfying — it’s genuinely unsettling by the time it reaches full tilt.
McAdams is the revelation here. Raimi has spoken publicly about casting her specifically because she had never played a villain before — he wanted audiences to be genuinely wrong-footed by what she becomes. It works. She arrives onscreen as the frumpy, overlooked corporate drone, all awkward cheerfulness and sensible shoes, and gradually transforms into something far more difficult to categorise. Her physicality is extraordinary. The moment you realise you’re no longer rooting for Linda in a straightforward way is one of the film’s great pleasures. The New York Times called it Raimi at his “most gleeful and twisted.” Deadline declared it “the first movie gem of 2026.” Roger Ebert’s site said this might simply be the best performance of McAdams’ career. None of those assessments are wrong.
O’Brien, meanwhile, commits completely to the comic grotesque. Bradley Preston is a specific and recognisable type — the man who inherited rather than earned, who mistakes confidence for competence — and O’Brien plays the island’s slow dismantling of that persona with real comedic intelligence. His deterioration is funny, then pathetic, then something stranger. Their dynamic is electric throughout, volatile and shifting in ways that keep the film genuinely unpredictable. One Letterboxd reviewer, probably the most accurate summary anyone has written, called it simply “Triangle of Sadness for freaks.”
Raimi’s direction is everything you want it to be. The crash sequence — bodies sucked out of a disintegrating plane, neckties becoming instruments of death — is pure gleeful brutality, and the island itself becomes an increasingly hostile character as the film progresses. There are crash zooms and match cuts, moments of deliberately shoddy CGI that feel almost affectionately retro, and a Danny Elfman score that swings between 1940s adventure serial grandiosity and something far more unsettling underneath. Eagle-eyed viewers will find a Bruce Campbell photograph lurking in Bradley’s office. A wild boar has a cameo that is simultaneously the film’s worst and most lovable special effect. This is a filmmaker working with joy, not obligation.
For UK and international viewers in particular, today is the real premiere. The theatrical window passed most of you by. This is your moment, and it’s a good one.
The island gives. The island takes. And Linda Liddle doesn’t need rescuing.
Dark Frights Verdict: Sam Raimi’s triumphant return to horror is sharp, schlocky, darkly funny, and anchored by a career-best Rachel McAdams. One of the best films of 2026. Stream it tonight.