When Alice (Souheila Yacoub) loses her abusive husband (George Pullar) in a car accident, her personal hell is far from over: as he’s laid to rest, the Deadites come calling.
The Evil Dead series is a tonal spectrum. The whole saga is oozing in entrails, but such ghoulish excesses are either deployed for splatstick laughs (Evil Dead II, Army Of Darkness) or genuine terror (Sam Raimi’s original The Evil Dead, Fede Alvarez’s 2013 Evil Dead). The last outing of the cackling Deadite demons — Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise — bridged the gap, combining raw gore and nasty shocks with a sense of Machiavellian mischief. Follow-up Evil Dead Burn, from incoming director Sébastian Vaniček, cranks the dial even darker, with nerve-rattling results.
Impressively, Vaniček — with co-writer Florent Bernard — manages to shake up the formula a little. How the Kandarian nasties get involved is different to any other film in the series. And for the first time, the Deadites have a purpose beyond simply swallowing souls — they’re on the backfoot, and they’re pissed. That makes them even deadlier for Alice (a hard-as-nails Souheila Yacoub), trying to tough out an emotional afternoon with the in-laws, hiding from them that their recently deceased son Will — her husband — was an angry, violent man; a dramatically rich dynamic for the demons to mine once they start infecting the family one by one.
Even for hardened Evil Dead fans, Burn is a gruelling ride.
Vaniček revels in the possibilities provided by an Evil Dead movie. A deeply stylish director, he orchestrates chaotic extended takes and gravity-defying tracking shots with thrilling precision. And he gets seriously gory, too — smashing heads, slamming fingers in doors, and melting charred flesh like pulled pork. There is a fire, an anger here that permeates the film, evident both in the human characters — Will’s propensity for violence is evidently an inherited family trait, simmering in dad Edgar (Erroll Shand), and latent deep within son Joseph (Wednesday’s Hunter Doohan) — and the supernatural forces.
But even for hardened Evil Dead fans, it’s a gruelling ride. The series exists on a tonal knife-edge between gleeful nastiness and the just plain unpleasant — and Burn occasionally strays on the wrong side of it. While the film has a genuine sense of humour, it’s also an intentionally dark and dour exploration of male aggression, set in the depths of winter, amid the ashes of grief. Combine that with this level of bloodshed, and it’s a lot to stomach. Oddly, it’s a little slack on the pacing side too. For all Vaniček clearly understands Evil Dead’s ferocious kineticism, he favours a series of slow build-ups (and gut-churning pay-offs) rather than letting the mayhem rocket along.
Still, this is a bold and brutal entry that refuses to water down its themes or its gnarliness, with smart twists on series lore. Maybe a little more grooviness next time, though.
The darkest Evil Dead yet is sure to be an acquired taste — but there is incredible craft here, along with plenty of guts (of all kinds).