Sébastien Vaniček takes the Evil Dead franchise to its bleakest, crunchiest extreme since the 2013 remake, and makes a vicious, surprisingly soulful case for going there, in this gnarly portrait of a family soaked in toxicity and violence.
★★★½
Dir. Sébastien Vaniček. With Souheila Yacoub, Tandi Wright, Hunter Doohan, Luciane Buchanan, Erroll Shand.
If the thing you go to Evil Dead films for is bleak, crunchy violence, Evil Dead Burn delivers it by the bucket. This is the most brutal entry in the series since Fede Álvarez’s 2013 remake, and perhaps the furthest the franchise has travelled down that particular end of its spectrum: a world of domestic violence and emotionally abusive family ties rendered with facial trauma-a-go-go. Vaniček said that he wanted to make a film that hurts, and he has been as good as his word.
This film’s evil is domestic before it is demonic. Our heroine Alice’s (Souheila Yacoub) toxic husband (Eroll Shand) storms away from her in a nightclub, smashes his car into a Deadite on a lonely forest road, and dies in the resulting fireball. After his funeral, Alice travels to the secluded family homestead of her late husband’s family – an emotionally-demanding and spiritually decaying bunch who never much wanted her in the family but nonetheless don’t seem compelled to let her go her own way now.
Grief is complicated here from the outset, because the marriage we glimpse in fragments was an abusive one, and the man she is mourning was also the man who hurt her. The family closes ranks around its own toxicity, and it makes for a rich, poisonous ecosystem to be trapped inside. The mother is a tightly wound enabler, wilfully blind to what her men are and what they do; the father is a surly slab of barely-managed rage. Between them they raised two sons who metabolised the same house in opposite directions: the dead husband into a controlling, toxic bully with a taste for look-what-you-made-me-do violence, and his brother into a passive, confrontation-avoiding coward who freezes at precisely the moments that call for nerve. She arrives as the outsider at a wake for someone she has every reason to be relieved to be rid of. Then, one by one, the relatives begin to turn, and the reunion curdles into a Deadite siege in which the vows she took in life prove horribly, literally, binding – even in death.
The best scene comes early, with an all-timer of a nightmare family dinner. Gathered around the table after the cremation, the whole bunch let their grievances off the leash: old cruelties resurface, the abusive undercurrents rise to the top, and the evening tips from awkward into unbearable, all while the Deadite influence quietly begins to take hold of one of them across the table. It is a masterclass in dread doing two jobs at once, the human horror and the supernatural one tightening on the same rope, and it is the moment the film most fully justifies its ambitions. A warning for the tender-hearted, though: not even the family dog is spared the spreading infection or the violence that follows it, so pet lovers may want to look away for a moment or two.
The effects work is frequently inspired. A close-up on a rampaging Deadite with his brains blown out, the frame angled so you peer into the side of his mouth and cranium while he strangles our heroine, is the kind of grotesque anatomical intimacy the series was built for, and Vaniček stages it with real relish. The whole film is sickly to look at. Yet at other points the CGI is underdone: full-body CGI Deadites seem weightless as they run across rooftops, and the final battle is against an antagonist who was clearly cooked up on a computer. As such, he lacks physical presence at exactly the moment the film needs him to feel like a body in the room. The series has always been at its most frightening when the horror is tactile, and a render is a slightly cooler thing to fear than a thing you can imagine touching. There’s a lot to be said for good old-fashioned makeup and puppetry.
The colour palette is drained to a narrow range of beiges and greys, as though the emotional register has been left out in overcast weather, half-sunk in the mud besides the peeling whitewash of this rotting American gothic homestead. This is the curdled household in which the carnage takes root, a home built for death.
If one thing holds Burn back from greatness, it is a tonal matter that goes to the heart of what an Evil Dead film is for. There is not quite enough comedy in the performances or the script; what humour there is has been smuggled in almost entirely by the director at the level of editing, via a range of playful match cuts. Vaniček’s bad-taste wit lives in his visual language: a speeding car ploughs into a Deadite and on the moment of impact he drops the bass and cuts straight to a close-up of a twerking backside in a nightclub. A savage set-piece in which a lake-bound Deadite rises from the water to attack two fishermen with the fishing lines torn from her own body, has a nasty playfulness the other kills cannot quite match, narratively irrelevant but clearly dropped in to give the crowd exactly what it wants.
What all this affection cannot quite conjure is the gleeful lunacy of the very best Evil Dead films, the sense that the movie itself has been possessed and is cackling at you. Vaniček reaches for it but once the violence takes over the bleak script and straight performances hold him back. This is a grimmer, more dour excursion than the maddest entries in the series.
There are a couple of pacing wrinkles too, and they carry the faint smell of a re-edit rather than anything fatal. The film does not always have the propulsive, careening energy of the franchise at its best. We are told relatively early that the Deadite husband is on his way back to his bride, and yet he does not actually arrive until the very end, despite setting off from a crematorium the heroine seems able to run back to in a matter of minutes. Did he stop for a cigarette or two on the way? Vaniček has acknowledged that a scene was trimmed late in the day to dodge an NC-17, so we know the third act was under the knife.
What rescues Burn, and lifts it above simple endurance-test horror, is that it means something. This is a film about grief curdling under pressure and about the cruelty of families, and it is interestingly racially loaded on top of that. The heroine, played by biracial African-French actress Souheila Yacoub (Swiss-born, of Tunisian and Flemish descent), is treated by the pasty all-American family as an interloper, a foreign object to be squeezed out, and her North African heritage reads as significant rather than incidental. Yacoub grounds the whole thing; she is the emotional core the rest of the film swirls around.
This casting means Evil Dead Burn feels of a piece with Vaniček’s debut, Vermines. Released internationally under the blander but still pointed title Infested, that was defiantly pro-immigrant from its title outward: a Parisian banlieue tower block overrun by spiders, its largely immigrant residents equated with the feared vermin of the name, then sealed inside when the police bar the exits and leave them to die. Vaniček has said he conceived the film as a study of people judged solely on origin and appearance, and vermine is a word with a long and ugly history of being aimed at the dehumanised. The English retitling to Infested sanded off the specific slur the French title was reclaiming, but still kept enough of the same charge to make its point. Read against all that, Burn‘s rotting whitewashed homestead squeezing out its outsider daughter-in-law shows Vaniček is still making films about who gets treated as an foreign object to be neutralised.
So: this is not the unhinged splatstick riot some will want, and it asks you to take your Evil Dead on the grim, bruising end of the register rather than the giddy one. But that is a choice, made with conviction, and it pays off. If you like your horror brutal, crunchy and emotionally overcast, Evil Dead Burn delivers exactly that, and it has a good deal more on its mind than the blood on its walls. Vaniček has honoured the franchise, brutalised his cast and his audience and said something grimly worthwhile about domestic violence and family toxicity. That is a heavier message than most studio horror manages.
Oh, and if you like your Evil Dead movies to tie into each other a little… stay for the post-credits scene.
Evil Dead Burn is in cinemas from 9 July.
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