The Verdict
Sam Raimi comes back to feature horror directing, drops an employee and her boss on a desert island after a plane crash, and dares you to find the original idea boring. You can't, and the critics couldn't either, which is why this thing sits at a 73 on Metacritic with the kind of warm reviews most survival films would crawl across broken glass for.
Rachel McAdams and Dylan O'Brien get handed a two-hander where the workplace hierarchy is just as dangerous as the lack of fresh water, and Dennis Haysbert shows up to add gravity in support. It's lean, it's tense, and it grossed around $94 million worldwide without a single Roman numeral in the title, which in 2026 counts as an act of rebellion.
Here's the bright side, and it's a real one: this is what happens when a master gets to make a non-IP horror movie with actual stakes. No lore, no franchise scaffolding, no setup for Send Help 2: The Sending. Just craft, a confined location, and two people who deserve each other's worst instincts.
What it nails
- ▲An original, non-IP premise in a horror landscape choking on sequels, and it grossed roughly $94 million worldwide on the strength of being itself.
- ▲Raimi's return to feature horror directing brings genuine tension and command of confined space, exactly what a stranded-on-an-island setup lives or dies by.
- ▲Casting Rachel McAdams and Dylan O'Brien as employee and boss turns the survival situation into a power struggle, so the dread is interpersonal, not just environmental.
- ▲Strongly positive reviews and a 73 Metacritic, which for a January survival thriller is the studio equivalent of striking gold.
What it botches
- ▼A confined two-hander lives entirely on its leads, so any moment the chemistry between McAdams and O'Brien slackens, there's nowhere on the island to hide it.
- ▼Desert-island survival is one of the most well-trodden setups in the genre, so the originality is in the execution, not the logline, and that's a high-wire act.
- ▼A late-January release date is the calendar's polite way of saying nobody expected this, which means it had to earn every dollar of that $94 million from scratch.
- ▼Dennis Haysbert in support is a gift the marketing barely leaned on, leaving some of the cast's gravity under-sold.
Who it's for
Anyone exhausted by cinematic universes who wants a tight, well-made survival thriller, and Raimi loyalists who've been waiting for him to point a camera at something scary again.
Who should skip
Gorehounds expecting Evil Dead chaos, and anyone who needs a sprawling cast and three subplots to stay awake, this one is deliberately, ruthlessly small.
The whole story lives on the hub