Tuna on the Cheek, Blood on the Screen: Review of “Send Help”

When I watched Send Help two nights ago, I kept waiting for the horror to announce itself with a straight face. It never did. The film opens in a fluorescent office where Bradley Preston—an heir in a blazer, a man-child in executive drag—struts through a company he inherited the way one inherits a bad habit. His confidence is all surface tension: glossy, brittle, and one sharp object away from collapse. From the first scene, it plays less like a fright fest and more like a comedy that knows its punchlines will land harder if they’re soaked in blood.

The supporting cast speaks fluent “bro,” a dialect of buzzwords and chest-thumping that echoes the bleak satire of In the Company of Men—only here the jokes move faster and the air is less suffocating. Early on, the movie tips its hand with a small, perfect humiliation: Linda Liddle, a socially awkward office worker with Survivor dreams, approaches Bradley with a chunk of tuna clinging stubbornly to her cheek. He can’t hear a word she says. The camera betrays him—cuts to a close-up of his eye, deranged and hypnotized by that fleck of fish like it’s a moral crisis. The gag is surgical. It reduces Bradley to appetite and Linda to spectacle in a single, merciless beat.

The degradation doesn’t stop there. Bradley and his phalanx of bros revel in their own language, a lexicon designed to inflate mediocrity into swagger. Then the film detonates its premise: a flight to Thailand, a thunderstorm, a crash, an island. Suddenly the hierarchy flips. Bradley’s confidence evaporates in the salt air, and Linda—quietly competent, long dismissed—becomes indispensable. Her survival skills, once a punchline, turn into the only currency that matters. The movie sharpens into what it always wanted to be: a comedy of reversal, where a cocky lightweight is schooled by the person he spent years underestimating.

Yes, there’s horror here—gore, shocks, the occasional indulgence in spectacle—but it all feels enlisted in the service of the joke. The violence doesn’t deepen the dread; it punctuates the satire. The film moves briskly, with clever turns that keep it buoyant where LaBute’s film sinks into a kind of moral tar. And yet the two works feel like distant relatives: both obsessed with cruelty, both fascinated by the theater of male arrogance, both willing to strip their characters bare. The difference is that Send Help has the decency to laugh while it does the stripping—and in that laughter, it finds its edge.