Send Help opens in theaters on January 30.

I’m really shooting myself in the foot here, but I feel compelled to open with a statement which itself constitutes a fulsome review of Send Help, and I’d totally understand if it’s all you needed to hear before buying your ticket and going about your day: if the idea of a Sam Raimi survival thriller centered on Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien going batshit bananas on a beach sounds like a good time at the movies, Send Help is for you.

After turning in one of the better post-Endgame Marvel movies – Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness – Raimi returns to simpler delights: namely, putting his leads through harrowing hell as they struggle to survive the elements and each other. There’s nothing better than seeing a master at work and at play at the same time.

There’s some immensely satisfying symmetry in how Raimi scales down here after Multiverse of Madness in the context of his last movie before that: 2010’s gooptastic Drag Me to Hell, which you’ll remember followed a woman gunning for a promotion and reckoning with how much of herself she’s willing to compromise in order to get it. Send Help goes in completely different directions with that conceit, but takes off from spiritually similar ground: Rachel McAdams plays the terminally chipper Linda Liddle who’s toiled for seven years crunching numbers for Preston Strategic Solutions working towards a vice president role within the company, and those efforts are derailed once Dylan O’Brien’s interminably annoying nepo baby Bradley Preston takes over as CEO.

Linda begins Send Help framed as a bit of a sad sack – desperate for connection with coworkers who want nothing to do with her – who goes home to her bird and works on research for her real dream gig: competing on Survivor. Surprise: those skills become quite relevant quite quickly. From the jump, Linda feels like she would have been right at home at the school lunch table with Tobey Maguire’s Peter Parker and Christine Brown from Drag Me to Hell, passed-over losers full of potential the world can’t or won’t see.

Bradley grudgingly brings Linda along for an important overseas trip, and it’s over those seas that their plane crashes and strands them on a tropical island. Life or death survival situations tend to expose the true self, and seeing how Linda and Bradley adapt and reveal themselves in their perilous circumstances drives much of the movie’s tension. This is the make-or-break moment Linda’s been waiting for her whole life, and Bradley is forced to confront just how much of his privilege has been spoon-fed to him.

Damian Shannon and Mark Swift’s (Freddy vs. Jason) script does great work starting Linda and Bradley at polar opposite points of audience sympathy, and seeing how adversity drives them towards the middle is supremely satisfying. Bradley’s terrible to Linda, but we see him make genuine overtures towards more self-awareness as he’s forced to confront his first impressions of her. Linda, on the other hand, has a past that puts her hunger for survival into a complex and rich frame that makes her decisions in the weeks that follow shocking, but nevertheless rooted in real emotion.

Raimi and McAdams do canny work making that clear by how Linda holds herself as Send Help goes, with a Clark Kent-worthy transition out of Linda’s initial shabbiness into an Amazonian warrior. Remember how Rob Schneider turned into Rachel McAdams in The Hot Chick? Raimi basically pulls that trick here in Send Help, with McAdams gleefully leaning into that transition by preening in moments where she’s alone, and getting bolder in her interest towards Bradley as their time on the island passes – a shift that Bradley can hardly reconcile with his disdain for her when they first meet. McAdams and O’Brien are both incredibly strong here in their own rights, but it’s their chemistry that keeps Send Help roaring full-speed ahead. From moment to moment, it’s never clear whether these two are going to kill or kiss each other, and McAdams and O’Brien’s dance between those possibilities never tires.

Excellent though she is in Send Help, Rachel McAdams’ success as a Raimi lead is less a revelation and more of a foregone conclusion: McAdams has been a comedy heavy since the very beginning of her career, and likewise has shown through darker projects like True Detective and Spotlight that she’s just as comfortable in more serious spaces. Both that humor and heaviness are of crucial importance to Linda’s function within this story, and flawlessly executed.

But it’s Dylan O’Brien who really feels like he’s breaking into new territory here, clearly reveling in Bradley’s unsavory, broad buffoonery, and that ironic and total lack of vanity as he snivels his way in and out of Linda’s good graces would make Bruce Campbell proud (something which Send Help seems to nod to with a nice piece of production design during Bradley’s introduction).

One of the most exciting things about watching a new Sam Raimi movie is seeing genre trappings refracted through his lens. Send Help’s mostly rooted in the survival thriller space, but out of that structure, Raimi animates and escalates those stakes in all the ways you could hope for. The shifting power dynamic between Linda and Bradley serves as the backbone of the action once they’re stranded on the island, but Raimi’s at the ready with an airhorn and a taser when it comes time for the big setpieces.

The plane crash which strands the pair is breathlessly exciting, full of quick little setups and payoffs that act as the first hints of how powerful Linda’s survival instincts are. Linda also puts herself to the test early by hunting a boar, and you’d better believe it doesn’t go exactly according to plan. If you’ve ever wondered how much blood and snot are contained within a boar, Send Help has an answer for you and the answer is “so much less than what we’re actually showing you.” But what of bile? Surely, there must be some bile in a Raimi picture!? And surely, there is. Oh, and some eye shit… some top-shelf eye shit that had me crawling in my skin (these wounds, they will not heal). These gore moments pop off like fireworks and pair wonderfully with the more psychologically-bent slings and arrows the two leads launch at each other.

Despite coming in under two hours, Send Help does occasionally double over itself here and there with respect to how it underlines Linda and Bradley’s suitability for their circumstances, even if that’s already been clearly and effectively established. Frequent Raimi collaborator Danny Elfman’s score also doesn’t leave much of an impression, serviceably punctuating the big moments but otherwise feeling a lot more nondescript than you may expect, especially given the bombastic heights the film reaches by the end. But Send Help represents such a purity of vision and intent that the nits there are to pick feel largely inoffensive.