I like Sam Raimi’s verve as a genre movie director. He demonstrates it in Send Help with the same enthusiasm for wild action and racing camera shots and gross jump scares and hilarious close-ups of characters at dire points in their lives that he once brought to The Evil Dead, the indie horror film that made him famous back in 1981.

Send Help is a nicely stripped-down, dark comic action-adventure thriller that suits Raimi to a T. It’s about a fortysomething downtrodden oddball misfit named Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) who lives alone with a pet cockatiel with whom she shares wine-drinking evenings watching Survivor, plus nightly snacks and long conversations. She works at a corporation where she’s long overdue for a promotion. But the company founder who promised her a position as vice president, based on her hard work and savant-like skills with numbers, has recently died, and his pampered douchebag son Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien) has taken over as CEO.

Bradley takes one gaping look at Linda, with her stringy hair and baggy sweaters and sensible shoes and bits of tuna fish from her lunchtime sandwich eaten at her desk still sticking to her chin, and mentally consigns her to oblivion, career-wise. She’s physically repulsive to him and therefore of no use to the company in his horndog view, despite all her skills and experience and dedication. But how to get rid of her efficiently? How about if he takes her along with his team on a business trip to Bangkok and finds so many ways to humiliate her, he sabotages her last chance to prove she’s worthy of keeping her job at all, much less get promoted?

But before we can begin to settle into that plotline, there’s a catastrophic plane crash into the ocean. The only survivors who wash up onto a remote island somewhere off the coast of Thailand are Linda and Bradley. He’s unconscious and has a nasty leg injury, and while he’s lying helpless, she demonstrates her Survivor-learned skills by efficiently setting up camp, gathering rainwater, and teaching herself to hunt.

However, Bradley can’t seem to understand that he’s witnessing the ascendance of Linda Liddle to a position of power over him. He continues to throw his weight around, reminding her, “You work for me,” and rebuking her for playing “Suzy Homemaker” on the island when she should be concentrating all her efforts on getting them rescued.

For Linda, once she’s on the island, there’s nothing easier to handle than Bradley’s arrogance. She simply withdraws her labor, walking off out of sight and not returning for a very long time. When she finally comes back, Bradley is parched from thirst, red from sunburn, and starving to death. He tearfully begs for her help. It’s so satisfying, Linda is soon wondering if she ever wants to leave the island at all — though she’s got a shameful crush on Bradley that makes her vulnerable to his persuasive gambits. But can the apparently chastened Bradley ever be trusted, when he’s so desperate to escape the island and resume his regular life, which gives him unearned wealth and authority over others?

Up to that point, Raimi moves through this narrative at a confident, speedy pace. But then the problem becomes, what next? The answer is further escalation of the power struggle — mind games, interludes of détente, manipulative ruses, entrapping maneuvers, physical attacks. All of that’s clear from the preview, by the way.

The movie’s too long — they all are, these days — so the constant surprise twists and turns get less and less surprising. But Raimi’s got a real ace in the hole in Rachel McAdams. I’m always impressed by her. She’s so good at everything, from the time she started making her mark in early roles in Slings & Arrows (2003–6), Mean Girls (2004), and The Notebook (2004) through later-career gems like her performances in Eurovision Song Contest (2020) and Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (2023). Yet somehow, she’s never as famous as she deserves to be. Her talent for convincingly portraying real human beings, which is harder than it seems and defeats a lot of actors, also prevents her from becoming a top star, I think. She seems like one of us.

Her Linda Liddle skirts perilously close to caricature, but McAdams always keeps her portrayal on the right side of the line. McAdams invests in the details of Linda’s off-putting habits arising from her intense loneliness that’s clearly driving her toward mental instability. But McAdams is also unsparing in playing the humor of Linda’s extremes as they’re perceived by others, like the way she’s so socially isolated, she’s lost her ability to calibrate how loud she’s talking or how weirdly she’s acting.

Plus there are indications early on that Linda has scary reserves of toughness before she ever gets to the island. During the airplane disaster, when the plane is dropping fast and one side is blown out, the same men who, before the engine exploded, were making fun of Linda’s Survivor audition tape that Bradley found online are now hanging onto her for dear life, trying not to get sucked out of the plane. The last one, who refuses to release his grip on her throat, is Donavan (Xavier Samuel), Bradley’s old college frat buddy whom he picked to get the promotion meant for Linda. “Give me your seat!” he keeps shouting. This movie is not trying to be subtle about its woman’s-revenge-flick effects.

Linda scrabbles for a fork and stabs Donavan’s hand, sending him flying out. But he’s caught on a strap, hanging onto the outside of the plummeting plane, screaming for help through Linda’s small window. In a perfectly timed dark comic gesture, McAdams’s Linda reaches out and slowly pulls down the plastic window shade.

Based on that, it follows logically later that Linda winds up ruling the island. She coolly and expertly weaves a palm-frond hat while Bradley’s once again trying to assert his dominance, then watches him from under the hat brim with a look that’s downright predatory. Linda’s hypercompetence at roughing it reaches absurd heights in Send Help, such as when she brings down a wild boar while armed with nothing but a long pointy stick. But to his credit, Raimi knows it’s ridiculous. The dark laughs immediately follow when she returns to camp covered in blood, throws down a chunk of raw meat, and asks the appalled Bradley, “You ever hunt? I think I like it.”

So if you’re craving genre movie escapist fun in the midst of all this hell lately, Sam Raimi’s made Send Help just for you.