What happens at the end of Send Help? Sam Raimi saves the cruelest twist for after the rescue
Send Help is Sam Raimi's first original feature since 2013's Oz the Great and Powerful — a survival horror-comedy released by 20th Century Studios on 30 January 2026, written by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift. It stars Rachel McAdams as overlooked corporate strategist Linda Liddle and Dylan O'Brien as Bradley Preston, the nepo-baby CEO who denies her a promised promotion.
Major spoilers from here. You've been warned.
The setup
Bradley drags Linda along on a business trip to Bangkok, but their private plane crashes into the Gulf of Thailand. They're the only survivors, washed up on a seemingly deserted island. Linda — a devoted Survivor fan with genuine skills — becomes the one keeping them both alive, and the power dynamic flips completely.
Then it curdles.
The island turns nasty
- The boat — early on, Linda spots a passing vessel and deliberately doesn't flag it down. She's decided it's too soon to be rescued.
- The berries — Bradley slips poisonous berries into her dinner and tries to flee on a homemade raft. It nearly kills him. She saves him anyway.
- The fish — Linda retaliates by paralysing him with a toxic fish and staging a fake castration (the knife actually goes into a rat) to make her position clear.
- Zuri — Bradley's fiancée (Edyll Ismail) arrives with a hired guide to rescue him. Linda sends them both off a cliff to their deaths.
The mansion reveal
Bradley finds Zuri's remains on the beach, confronts Linda, and flees to the side of the island she'd declared off-limits for "poisonous plants". There he discovers the real reason it was off-limits: a billionaire's luxury mansion, which Linda has been quietly raiding for supplies for weeks. Their final fight ends with Bradley grabbing a shotgun — empty — and Linda beating him to death with a golf club. The same sport he'd used to humiliate her back in the office.
The twist after the rescue
Here's the cruel part. Linda builds a raft, gets herself rescued, and tells the world she was the crash's sole survivor — Bradley, in her telling, simply didn't make it. Nobody questions the meek, likeable woman who endured so much. A flash-forward shows her wealthy off the back of her survival story, driving into the sunset in a luxury car with her pet bird.
Is there a different ending?
There is. The home release, which hit physical media on 21 April 2026, includes an alternate ending in which Dennis Haysbert's character Franklin works out what happened to Zuri and moves to blackmail Linda.
She saw that coming too.