‘Evil Dead Burn’ movie review: Sébastien Vaniček’s splattercraft is dragged into the grave by a necrotic screenplay

Sébastien Vaniček has inherited one of cinema’s most stubbornly unkillable legacies. Since Sam Raimi stopped directing theEvil Dead films he created in the ‘80s, the franchise has evolved into a publicly funded laboratory for genre directors with strong visual instincts and very specific psychological fixations. Fede Álvarez translated the post-Saw decade into an industrial-grade bodily punishment in 2013, and Lee Cronin relocated the Deadites from isolated cabins to a pressure cooker of an apartment tower. Now, Evil Dead Burn hands the mythology to the French filmmaker behind Infested, whose fascination with invasive violence remains intact, even if franchise obligations frequently tone down the far harsher traditions of New French Extremity. 

The premise relocates the familiar Necronomicon mythology into an already poisoned funeral gathering. Alice, played with bruised conviction by Souheila Yacoub, joins the family of her recently deceased husband Will after his violent death on a rural New Zealand road. We soon discover that Will spent their marriage exercising coercive control behind closed doors while his parents remained either oblivious or conveniently invested in preserving the myth of the perfect son. The demonic possession to follow simply accelerates patterns of cruelty already embedded inside the household.

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But before Alice even enters the story, Burn dutifully fulfils the franchise’s contractual obligation to ruin an ordinary day outdoors, introducing two forgettable fishermen whose encounter with a Deadite rapidly escalates from fish hooks through eyelids, a waist-high bisection, and a human slow boil that would probably earn a standing ovation from Hannibal Lecter. The same Deadite then lurches onto a country road where Will ploughs straight into her, sending his car tumbling into a violent rollover, only for the corpse still skewered through the shattered windshield to calmly peel its own head from the mangled body and resume the franchise’s familiar Kandarian incantation: Kunda, Astratta, Montosse, Kanda (which 45 years of Evil Dead movies have successfully convinced me should never be recited out loud under any circumstances).

Flash forward to the funeral, Will’s father Edgar (Erroll Shand) demands time alone with Will’s coffin, only to emerge carrying something far worse than grief. His eventual possession merely amplifies a temperament the film has already established through simmering intimidation. Susan (Tandi Wright), proves even more unsettling because she never requires demonic influence to participate in the family’s dysfunction. She canonises her dead son through selective memory, dismisses Alice’s visible discomfort throughout the wake, and continues protecting the fantasy of the perfect family (even after that fantasy starts chewing through people’s faces). Grandma Polly (Maude Davey), whose advanced dementia is initially just uncomfortable comic relief, eventually becomes another Deadite, turning her physical frailty into one of the film’s nastier visual gags. And Will’s brother Joseph (Hunter Doohan) and his girlfriend Thya (Luciane Buchanan) spend the evening attempting to de-escalate arguments over inheritance and Will’s memory, before the Deadite chaos ensues.

This psychological foundation contains genuine promise because horror works best when it uses its monsters as accelerants to brewing unpleasantries. George Romero’s zombies exposed the consumer rituals of suburban America because the apocalypse simply stripped away polite performance. Tobe Hooper turned the American family business into a slaughterhouse once post-industrial decline hollowed it out. Even Jordan Peele approaches race through the fallacies of liberal comfort. Vaniček understands the tradition of using horror to expose social structures already in motion, but Burn eventually loses faith in that principle and keeps returning to Alice’s domestic abuse through franchise-minded literalism.

A still from ‘Evil Dead Burn’
| Photo Credit:
Warner Bros.

Vaniček’s filmmaking nevertheless delivers several fantastic sequences that immediately justify why this franchise remains a proving ground for ambitious horror directors. Plenty of filmmakers can dream up inventive deaths, but Vaniček’s real talent lies in recognising the latent violence buried inside ordinary design. Chairs, headrests, seatbelts, fountain pens, dishwashers, fishing lines and bathroom porcelain all carry their advertised function for exactly as long as the Deadites stay away, after which each discovers a more gnarly application. 

Throughout these scenes cinematographer Philip Lozano keeps the camera moving with handheld restlessness before periodically widening the frame for us to appreciate the mechanics of each grotesque action. But for reasons unknown, Jane O’Kane builds all these elaborate prosthetics and practical effects only for the colour grade to file them under fifty shades of damp concrete.

Several digital effects during the closing confrontation similarly robs us of those previous tactile pleasures. After spending two hours convincing us that steel, flesh and bone possess a gratifying physical weight, Burn gradually hands its final Deadite over to conspicuous digital augmentation whose frictionless movement feels imported from an entirely different horror tradition. Raimi’s original trilogy derived its grotesque elasticity from latex appliances, corn syrup, stop-motion trickery and camera movement that physically bullied performers through the frame, but Vaniček delegates too much of the climactic spectacle to software.

Despite constructing a nasty portrait of how families manufacture and protect abusive men, and its Obsession-style autopsy of masculine entitlement/spinelessness, my larger frustration with Burn ultimately has very little to do with Vaniček’s filmmaking. The screenplay simply just doesn’t seem to trust the film. Every time Vaniček finds a fresh visual language for this family’s pathology, whether through Edgar’s increasingly feral physicality, Susan’s maternal denial curdling into Deadite fanaticism, or Alice navigating extensions of Will’s violence even after his death, the contemporary studio horror machine has developed an almost compulsive need to annotate its monsters. Every ghoul must apparently justify itself through psychological metaphor before audiences grant artistic legitimacy, and that impulse steadily flattens one of horror’s oldest strengths. Sometimes the most intellectually honest response to a horror film is also the simplest one, and watching a Deadite get introduced to the business end of a jackhammer drill will always remain an entirely sufficient argument in favour of the genre’s existence.

Evil Dead Burn is currently running in theatres

Published – July 13, 2026 11:14 am IST