“Directed by Sam Raimi” was all I needed to hear when I decided to go check out the sneak preview of Send Help (2026). Outside of the synopsis and a few screen grabs on the Marcus Theaters website, I went in completely blind, and left the theater with a smile on my face. It’s a good bet you will, too.

Read on for my spoiler free review…

Synopsis

Linda Liddle and Bradley Preston, two colleagues who find themselves stranded on a deserted island after they are the only survivors of a plane crash. On the island, they must overcome past grievances and work together to survive, but ultimately, it becomes an unsettling and darkly humorous battle of wills and wits to make it out alive.

Sam Raimi directed the film. It stars Rachel McAdams, Dylan O’Brien, and Dennis Haysbert.

It’s A Jungle Out There

In the movie Castaway, Tom Hanks finds himself stranded on a desert island with only a volleyball named Wilson to keep him company. Now, imagine if you will, instead of sporting goods, you are stranded in the same situation, but with your asshole boss. That’s the setup for Send Help, which pairs hard working and underappreciated Linda (Rachel McAdams) with entitled nepo baby Bradley (Dylan O’Brien) who just so happens to have passed her over for a promised promotion right before their plane goes down on the way to Thailand. What follows is a wickedly funny survival tale that takes the audience on a genre bending roller coaster ride as only Sam Raimi can.

The Odd Couple

Once the stage is set, Send Help becomes a two person show. Fortunately, Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien have a great chemistry that propels the story forward in a compelling, humorous way. Familiar tropes evolve into clever twists and turns, intermixed with the tongue in cheek humor and hilarious gross out moments that audiences have come to expect from a Sam Raimi picture.

There are laughs aplenty, as the couple’s misadventures had the preview audience, myself included, in stitches on more than one occasion. As the film progresses, the story morphs until you’re not quite sure where it’s going to go next, but it all comes together in an ultimately satisfying, darkly humorous way. The film features music by Danny Elfman, whose tropical score hits all the right notes. Be sure to keep your eyes open for a Bruce Campbell appearance (of sorts). This is Sam Raimi after all.

Final Thoughts

Send Help is smart and funny. Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien shine. This film was a pleasant surprise and a real treat for Sam Raimi fans and fans of dark humor and comedy horror in genaral.

Send Help releases in theaters nationwide on January 30, 2026. I heartily recommend you check it out!

Although the goal of “Saturday Night Live” week after week is comedy (“Allegedly!” yells a heckler from the back row), not all guests hosts show up just to prove they can be hilarious.

Instead, some do the show to not only promote their latest project, but to introduce additional parts of themselves to what may be the biggest audience they’ve had to date.

That felt like the case with Teyana Taylor, who was nominated this week for a lead actress Oscar for “One Battle After Another” after walking away with a Golden Globe earlier this month. In her first time hosting “SNL,” the goal seemed less to make her the funniest host than to show people who only know her from the Paul Thomas Anderson film that she’s incredibly talented in more ways than just acting.

After a charming monologue that included her young children, Taylor sang with cast member Kenan Thompson in an airport terminal sketch featuring Shrimp ‘n’ Grits, two gate agents who make their flight delay announcements as R&B songs. Sure, cast member James Austin Johnson may have come in and stolen the sketch as a pilot who’s been drinking, but it was the first indication that Taylor could hold her own vocally with the longest-running cast member in “SNL” history, Thompson.

Later in the show, she dazzled in a dance performance as a surprisingly limber 87-year-old grandpa who’s brought to life by Earth, Wind & Fire songs at his grandson’s wedding. She co-hosted a news panel show in which the two Black hosts (Taylor and Thompson) wordlessly hum judgment on opinions spouted by their white panelists (Mikey Day and Chloe Fineman) and played her “One Battle” character Perfidia Beverly Hills in a pitch-perfect Mattel toy commercial parody.

Taylor played smaller supporting parts such as sideline reporter Lisa Salters in an NFL report that turns into an extended promo for a lesbian culinary show called “Quefs.” “Queer Chefs?” Sportscasters Troy Aikman (Andrew Dismukes) and Joe Buck (Johnson) were afraid to guess. She also portrayed a confused contestant who is there to make friends on a “Survivor”/”Traitors”-style reality competition show and a student in a confidence class taught by a wreck of a teacher (a fantastic Ashley Padilla).

Was Taylor the funniest host “SNL” has had this season? Not by a long shot. But she proved to be one of the most multi-talented.

Musical guests Geese performed “Au Pays du Cocaine” and “Trinidad.” Please Don’t Destroy’s Martin Herlihy wrote and directed a short film that closed the episode about techniques to get someone to break up with you.

In what may have been a missed opportunity, “SNL” wasn’t able to pivot on short notice to address the day’s biggest national news in its cold open: the killing of an ICU nurse by federal agents in Minneapolis. The incident was alluded to on “Weekend Update,” and egregiously missing from a news panel sketch that specifically talked about incidents in Minneapolis. Instead, perhaps to the show’s detriment, it was another week of Johnson’s President Trump impression, this time as host of the Trumps, an award show for the president and members of his administration. There were jokes at the expense of J.D. Vance (Jeremy Culhane) and Kristi Noem (Padilla); for the former it was a dig on his sexuality while Noem was honored for sucking up to Trump before the president stole her award, Kanye West-style. Mike Myers returned as twitchy, unfunny Elon Musk, there to introduce a memorial segment and accompanying song eulogizing the things the Trump administration has taken down including the East Wing, D.E.I., civil rights and Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Taylor’s monologue focused on the other interests and pursuits she has apart from acting in Oscar-nominated films, like directing and going to culinary school. She showed a clip of herself dancing in MTV’s “My Super Sweet 16,” a real thing that happened in her life, and mentioned winning “The Masked Singer” (also true). But the monologue ended with Taylor discussing being a mother and how her big moment at the Golden Globes was undercut by her kids playing on their phones during her speech. Cut to her kids in the “SNL” audience, looking at their phones. Any parent could relate.

Best sketch of the night: This could be better than Mattel’s ‘Boogie Nights’ playsets

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You may think that the only movie kids care about at the Academy Awards this year is “KPop Demon Hunters,” but according to this ad from Mattel, it’s toys based on “One Battle After Another” that they really want. The movie’s main characters get action figures with accessories like a battle robe for Leonardo DiCaprio’s character Bob and a pregnant belly add-on for Taylor’s. The parents in the ad (Padilla and Mikey Day) don’t love their kids acting out the lives of toys with names like Junglepussy or reenacting a motel sex scene between Taylor and Sean Penn’s characters. Great conclusion to the piece: the promise of toys based on other Anderson films including “There Will Be Blood.” “I’ve abandoned my boy!” a kid cries, a clever shoutout to an all-but-forgotten Bill Hader sketch.

Also good: Grandpa Jackson probably dances so well because he has no bones

Wedding sketches are a staple on “SNL,” but there probably has never been a guest host who danced the hell out of one the way Taylor did as Grandpa Jackson, who takes to the dance floor to celebrate the bride and groom (Padilla and Kam Patterson). Even with the sketch threatening to go off the rails as Taylor’s bald cap started peeling off, she never missed a step and her dance moves were astonishing. Johnson appeared as a sort-of doctor to help the grandfather after he finally collapses to put a nice capper on the basic, but very effective sketch.

‘Weekend Update’ winner: That’s a wrap for ‘cap’

New featured cast member Culhane debuted on “Update” as Mr. On Blast, a roasting commentator with very light roasts and a lot of body language. But it was Marcello Hernández who won the week with helpful translations of Gen Z expressions including “chopped,” “fahhh” and “glo-up.” Hernández teased “Update” co-host Colin Jost for being out of the loop, declaring terms such as “cap” dead the moment Jost used them (with a gravestone for emphasis). As Hernández explained, Gen Z slang is just Black slang adopted by young people before it gets used by white people. “Once Elon Musk says it, it’s dead,” he declared.

There is nothing obviously wrong with Audrey (Moon Choi). The 36-year-old has a physical therapist job she cares about, with coworkers she mostly likes. Her Brooklyn apartment looks small and a bit shabby, but comfortable. She’s single, but seems to enjoy an active, lightly kinky sex life on the apps.

It’s just that she seems adrift, somehow — as if she’s not only lost her way but forgotten where she was trying to go in the first place, if indeed she ever knew.

Bedford Park, Stephanie Ahn’s poignant directorial debut, follows Audrey on her path toward something like self-actualization, sparked by a chance encounter with a similarly lonely soul. Though its unflashy style and delicate emotionality are unlikely to sweep viewers off their feet, its eye for fine detail and bittersweet tone make it an absorbing experience worth seeking out.

This transformative relationship enters Audrey’s life through the unlikeliest of avenues. Eli (Son Sukku), a rough-around-the-edges ex-wrestler, is the other party in a car accident that leaves Audrey’s mom (Won Mi-kyung) with an injured wrist. The incident forces Audrey back into her childhood home in suburban New Jersey to help take care of her, and into Eli’s orbit to help square away the insurance information and repair bills.

Audrey and Eli’s first meeting is a contentious one, with accusations and rude words and eventually pieces of fruit getting thrown around in all directions. (Between this and Netflix’s Beef, there’s apparently no better outlet for Korean American Millennial angst than car-based tantrums.) But a second encounter takes a turn when Audrey finds herself in a vulnerable position, and Eli, a decent guy underneath his prickly exterior, steps up to help. The mutual thawing turns into a mutually beneficial carpool arrangement, which warms into friendship and eventually more.

The script, also by Ahn, leans slightly too much on contrivances to nudge the relationship along. And while Eli’s solitude is explained by his circumstances (he’s laying low from a shady situation engineered by a toxic relative), it’s harder to tell whether we’re meant to understand Audrey as having no other friends whatsoever, or if it’s just more convenient for the screenplay that whatever pals she does have forget to text her the entire time she’s in New Jersey.

But it helps make up for these minor missteps that Ahn has such a firm grasp on who her characters are and where they’re coming from. Combined with her eye for small but telling details — an introductory scene of Eli eating peanut butter directly out of the jar with his fingers speaks volumes about where this man is in his own life, before he even speaks a word — it ensures that even when certain plot beats feel a bit engineered or random, the emotions rippling out from them are wholly believable.

As the central not-quite-couple, Son and Choi are intriguingly unpredictable together at first, like a pair of stray cats sizing each other up, ready to pounce or run as needed. When they finally begin to let their guards down, one awkward car-ride convo or hesitant food court meal at a time, the connection is more profound and more tender for being so hard-won.

What brings Audrey and Eli together, other than a slow-burn attraction, is a sense of stuckness — of being trapped between the heavy expectations of their families and the dissatisfaction they harbor about lives that haven’t quite turned out as they’d hoped (even if they themselves probably couldn’t articulate what exactly it was they did want).

Audrey, the single and childless and PhD-less product of a stable but unhappy home, has fallen short of the life planned out for her by her parents. In the present, her mother lies to her church friends about Audrey’s nonexistent medical career, pressures her to date a nice and rich but hopelessly boring divorcé and guilt-trips Audrey into extending her stay. Eli, whose childhood was fractured by tragedy, dodges a mother who seems more interested in asking him for money than offering him love, and hides out from an ex and young daughter whose life he apparently fears ruining.

No wonder they feel that in each other, they’ve finally found the one person around whom, as Audrey puts it, they can finally breathe — someone who comes to them with no preconceptions or expectations, who see them for the person they actually are and not the person they want them to be.

Woven through this entire messy tangle of relationships is the issue of their shared Korean American identity, in all its variously beautiful and burdensome complexities. It is a gift that Bedford Park grants its leads the space to navigate that complex terrain on their own terms, rather than falling back on stereotypes that position it solely in opposition to a “mainstream” (white) culture.

It empathizes with Audrey, who is unwilling to be the dutiful girl her mother wants her to be, but isn’t ready to entirely reject the role, either. It’s gentle about Eli, born in Korea but raised by a white mother, feeling self-conscious because he prefers forks to chopsticks and barely understands the language of his birth parents.

And it understands that the umbrella of that identity might cover even those who’d rather reject it — like Audrey’s mother, who moved to the U.S. in search of a better life for her children but now bemoans the fact that they’re too American; or her father (Kim Eung-soo), whose pride has never recovered from the loss of status he suffered when he traded his cushy office job in Korea for blue-collar grocery store work in the States.

Almost inevitably, Bedford Park makes its way to the Korean concept of han, defined here by Audrey as “an ancient heartache when a person carries their family’s trauma.” Is it “carried voluntarily, like a sense of duty,” she and Eli wonder over beers and bar food, or do they have no choice in the matter?

The film doesn’t have any firm answers to counter these questions, let alone any easy reassurances or even a tidy happy ending. But in its nuance, its curiosity and its deep affection for its characters, it offers anyone familiar with burdens like Eli and Audrey’s the same thing they give to each other — the chance to sit down and take a breath, with someone who really gets it.