‘Send Help’ Ending, Explained

Warning: This article contains massive spoilers for Sam Raimi’s Send Help.Send Help has officially kicked off 2026’s seemingly endless list of highly-anticipated releases, and its abundant twists are rivaled only by its jaw-dropping ending. Sam Raimi’s return to horror has already been Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, and for good reason, with a 92% critics score and an 88% audience score on the day of the film’s release. This is not only a result of the immense talent involved, but the crucial conversation its conclusion inspires.

Starring Rachel McAdams in a career-best performance, Send Help revolves around Linda Liddle, a socially awkward but hardworking employee in the Strategy and Planning department of Preston Strategic Solutions. After her former boss passes away, his arrogant and misogynistic son, Bradley (Dylan O’Brien), assumes the role of CEO and quickly overlooks Linda for the vice president role she’s been working toward. When she confronts him about his oversight, Bradley invites Linda to attend an important meeting in Bangkok, a trip that goes dangerously awry when their plane crash-lands in the Gulf of Thailand. As the sole survivors, Linda and Bradley must learn to work together to survive while navigating the shift in power dynamics their wild new environment inspires.

It’s no wonder why MovieWeb’s Mark Keizer has described Send Help as “a thrilling two-hander.” Distributed by 20th Century Studios, the film’s marketing promises that it boasts a mind-blowing finale that has to be seen to be believed. Not only is this true, but it merits instant discussion, so let’s dive into Send Help’s shocking ending as well as what that mind-blowing final twist really means.

‘Send Help’s Biggest Twists, Explained

Dylan O’Brien and Rachel McAdams in ‘Send Help’

20th Century Studios

Send Help is a minefield when it comes to twists, and they start to fall like dominoes when Bradley’s fiancée, Zuri (Edyll Ismail), unexpectedly arrives on the island. To Linda’s horror, Zuri pulls up in a boat captained by a man who has been helping her search for Bradley. As Linda leads Zuri and the captain toward Bradley, she begins to consider killing them before Bradley has a chance to learn of their arrival. When they reach the cliff where Bradley saved Linda’s life earlier in the film, Linda lets Zuri slip, watching as the captain tries to pull her to safety. In the next scene, when Linda returns to the beach alone, the viewer surmises that Zuri and the captain have died.

Another twist occurs when Bradley goes into the jungle in search of protein only to find a wild boar biting at a hand poking out of the sand. As he inches closer, he realizes that the hand belongs to his fiancée, Zuri, with the engagement ring he bought her prominently displayed on her ring finger. The rage that erupts from Bradley upon realizing his fiancée is dead leads him to confront Linda on the beach, which results in them trying to kill each other in the jungle. Linda tries to strangle Bradley with her shoelaces; he rips out a gnarly mix of hair and skin; she bites his hand and swallows Zuri’s engagement ring; he jams his thumb into her eye. (Don’t worry – most of Disney’s other most anticipated movies of 2026 won’t be quite as graphic.) The grisly battle ends with Linda stabbing Bradley with a knife and Bradley taking off into the jungle – in the exact direction Linda told him never to go in.

Send Help’s biggest twist occurs when Bradley learns the shocking truth Linda has been keeping from him: there’s a mansion on the island, and it’s been there the entire time. This means that Linda and Bradley could have theoretically called for help as soon as they washed ashore. Linda had previously told Bradley not to venture toward the X-shaped rocks on the far side of the island because the jungle beyond was laced with “thorn bushes and poison vines.” In reality, the X marks the spot where the hidden mansion is located. The moment Bradley sees it, he runs to the house, bangs on the glass doors, and slides one open to find a luxurious kitchen with a basket of fresh fruit inside. As he chugs a cold water bottle from the refrigerator, the kitchen goes dark and Linda’s voice comes on over a loudspeaker, confirming that she’s known about the house all along.

As Bradley quickly learns, Linda found the mansion (which belongs to a Wall Street billionaire) soon after their arrival on the island. On one of her exploratory walks, she happened to see a speedboat dock on the shore and a pair of caretakers deliver fresh fruit to the house. After watching them type the entrance code into an outdoor keypad, Linda broke into the house, turned off the security system, and disposed of all the kitchen knives (minus the one she later stabbed Bradley with). She then confesses that they could have been rescued “some time ago,” except for the inconvenient truth that she wasn’t ready to leave the island quite yet. As Bradley smashes the security cameras one by one, Linda tracks him from the house’s security room, explaining that her growing desire to stay on the island with him is what kept her from revealing the truth. In a flashback, we learn that as the boat captain was trying to save Zuri’s life, Linda bashed him over the head with a rock, causing both to plunge to their deaths.

What Happens to Bradley Preston At the End of ‘Send Help’

Dylan O'Brien as Bradley Preston in 'Send Help' — Dylan O’Brien as Bradley Preston in ‘Send Help’

As Bradley makes his way through the dark house, he ends up in a room filled with horned statues and golf clubs mounted on the wall. When Linda enters the room, she points a shotgun at him, at which point Bradley falls to his knees and tearfully admits to being a monster. Linda keeps the shotgun aimed at him as he takes accountability for how he’s treated her and proposes that they stay on the island together, since they know they can survive whatever comes their way. He even admits to loving her – a revelation as cringeworthy as Raimi’s worst movie – which Linda dutifully echoes.

As Linda quickly sees, however, one of the horns in a nearby statue has been removed – a realization Bradley interrupts by slicing her with the horn and knocking the shotgun out of her hands. As Linda reaches for a golf club strung up on the wall behind her, Bradley retrieves the gun and points it at her. Bradley then tries to shoot Linda, only to realize that the bullets in the gun are blanks. With a few quick swings of the golf club, Linda knocks Bradley to the floor and onto his back. As she hovers over him, she reminds him which department of his company she works in: “Strategy and Planning.” She then takes the swing that ends his life.

Bradley Preston may have thought he was the smartest person in any room he walked into, but therein lay his fatal flaw. He spends all of Send Help underestimating Linda, even after she repeatedly proves to him just how smart and resourceful she is. Had he not cruelly laughed his way through her Survivor audition tape, he would have heard her say that in addition to knowing all three ways to make a fire, she’s also always 10 steps ahead. Furthermore, his death by golf club serves as an ironic bit of symbolism. Earlier in the film, when Linda storms into his office after not getting the promotion she was promised, Bradley condescendingly tells her that she’s “not ready for an executive position.” He says that he’s looking for more of a “people person,” someone well-liked who can charm a room – “somebody who golfs.” He then sinks a golf ball into the hole of his in-office putting mat as Linda looks on, horrified by his arrogance. In the end, Bradley’s overinflated ego and failure to recognize Linda’s value results in his own demise, with a golf club as the murder weapon bringing his journey tragically full-circle.

What Happens To Linda Liddle At the End of ‘Send Help’

As for Linda – whose cinematic existence instantly changes the ranking of McAdams’ best movies – things turn out as well as they possibly can. After she kills Bradley, Send Help flashes forward nearly a year later to a celebrity golf invitational that finds Linda front and center on an actual putting green. As an interviewer asks her a series of questions, we learn a few interesting details, starting with the fact that Linda has “grown to love” golf. She’s also become a beloved celebrity after being found floating on a raft – a tongue-in-cheek nod to an earlier conversation she had with Bradley wherein she insisted that escaping the island via raft should be a last resort.

We also learn that Linda is believed to be the sole survivor of the plane crash that led to her and Bradley being stranded on the island. From this, we deduce that Linda disposed of Bradley’s body, made sure that Zuri and her male companion were also adequately buried, and left no trace of her time inside the mansion behind. Linda’s status as a “real-life Survivor” has also led her to become a bestselling author and, as the interviewer notes, the book she wrote is being turned into a movie. Linda then reveals that she’s writing a self-help book next, and for a very specific reason. “No help is coming,” she says directly to the camera. “So you better start saving yourself.” In the next scene, Linda drives down a coastal highway in a new convertible as “One Way or Another” – the song she would have sung on karaoke night had her coworkers invited her – plays in the background. Her bird, Sweetie, who clearly survived while she was away, sits in the passenger seat. In the film’s final moment, Linda looks directly at the camera as if to say, “Your move.”

The Real Meaning of ‘Send Help,’ Explained

Send Help is nothing if not a genre-bending mind game, so there are multiple interpretations that can be gleaned from its jaw-dropping ending. On a story level, Linda found herself caught in a battle for survival, and given that she kept the mansion’s existence a secret and let Bradley’s fiancée fall to her death, she didn’t have a choice; she needed to either kill him or risk being killed herself. Had she let Zuri find him, they would have all left the island and Linda would have gone right back to the life she detested, possibly even receiving a termination notice from Bradley once they got home. Similarly, had Bradley not discovered Zuri’s hand in the sand, there’s a chance that he and Linda would have stayed on the island forever, as she did not plan on telling him that she was a murderer or that there was a house around the corner. Revealing herself to be just as selfish as Bradley, Linda chose her own self-interest over his, making Send Help as much of a survival-of-the-fittest tale as it is a psychological exploration of desire and greed.

The real meaning of Send Help, though, lies in Linda’s uphill battle as a woman in a male-dominated workplace. Before she and Bradley board the plane, she is belittled, undermined, made fun of, left out of meetings, not invited to coworker outings, denied the promotion she was promised, and generally made to feel like she’s not good enough. On the island, after saving Bradley’s life multiple times and doing everything in her power to ensure their mutual survival, she is poisoned, betrayed, laughed at, devalued, and left to die, cementing that Bradley will only ever see her as a woman far beneath him. When Linda turns to the camera at the end and says that help is not coming, it’s reasonable to assume she’s talking directly to female viewers who have endured similarly abhorrent treatment from the men in their lives. She’s not necessarily encouraging island entrapment or grotesque violence, but she is daring said women to take the boar by the tusks and do whatever is needed to live a better life. Too many men, after all, don’t treat women as their equals, nor are they capable of accepting the notion of a woman in a dominant role. Through her upbeat, albeit bloody, example, Linda proves that there’s light at the end of the equality tunnel for anyone brave enough to step into it.

One can’t help but notice an even broader message embedded in Linda’s most important line. As plenty of viewers can attest, especially in the last year, it has become far too easy to let both local and global events negatively affect one’s happiness. Under an administration that has subjected its citizens to tariffs, an ever-increasing cost of living, disputes with other countries, and the life-threatening dangers associated with public immigration crackdowns, it can too often feel like help is, in fact, not on the way. Linda Liddle’s assertion that “you better start saving yourself” can just as easily be taken as a mass directive, regardless of gender, to individually seek out a better way of life. In an age when dictatorial decisions are made daily – by rich men, for the benefit of rich men – perhaps Linda is giving us all permission to be as happy as we can no matter what life throws at us. Her worldview, after all, is that the most important thing for human survival is a positive attitude. If she can spend weeks surviving one of the worst men alive, then maybe, just maybe, the rest of us can, too.