Director: Sébastien Vaniček
Stars: Souheila Yacoub, Erroll Shand, Luciane Buchanan
Everyone has ‘their’ Evil Dead. For the dyed-in-the-wool purists there’s Sam Raimi’s none-more-inventive original, making up techniques as it went along. For the easy going and the extroverted there’s the Looney Tunes slapstick of his two follow-ups. DIY cinema at it’s most anarchic. For the angry problem children there’s Fede Álvarez’s bleak addiction allegory of 2013; a hangover from the ’00s stream of ultra-mean genre remakes. And the relative newcomers may defer to Lee Cronin’s high-rise horror Evil Dead Rise from just a couple of years back, which attempted (with good success) to do for cheese graters what the series had previously done for a shotgun and a chainsaw.
What I’m getting at is that Evil Dead swings like the twitching needle on a metal detector, making dramatic tonal jerks with each successive entry and I’ll admit some trouble, personally speaking, in striking gold with it. I’ve been impressed by or admired the series, but I’ve never quite felt exhilarated, transformed or seen by it. Until now, that is. But this enthusiasm of mine comes with some steep stipulations. Even by the standards of Álvarez’s grim remake, this entry is tough.
‘Jessica’ (Greta van den Brink) bridges the divide between Rise and Burn, re-emerging from that fucking lake to ruin a perfectly good fishing trip. But more than ever before the Deadites seem imbued with purpose; a loopy bit of lore ultimately useful for giving the piece direction and momentum as it carves up it’s other, more misanthropic thematic concerns.
Alice (Souheila Yacoub) is a French immigrant to the States trapped in an abusive marriage to controlling restaurateur Will (George Pullar). When he’s incinerated in a car accident caused by ‘Jessica’, Alice finds herself deeply conflicted about how to feel and behave at his cremation. Arriving on the day in trainers and a hoodie with no eulogy prepared raises eyebrows with her in-laws, though Will’s sympathetic brother Joseph (Hunter Doohan) and his girlfriend Thya (Luciane Buchanan) remain supportive friends. Aping COVID-19 with their ability to infect through proximity and bodily fluids, the Deadites jump from ‘Jessica’ to Will and into Will’s grieving father Edgar (Erroll Shand), edging closer and closer to the family home where Will’s long-deceased grandfather was once holed up researching the dreaded Book of the Dead.
As family members turn, long held resentments and animosities bubble to the surface. The possessed weaponise the deep cuts of emotional connections to hurt just as readily as they wield the assortment of household objects at their disposal (Burn makes particularly gruelling use of a fountain pen). Alice herself has remained tight-lipped about Will’s temper and violence, preserving him in the eyes of Edgar and matriarch Susan (Tandi Wright) as their hallowed ‘successful’ son (sensitive Joseph is a wannabe author without a finished novel to his name). Over the course of a gruelling 24 hours, all secrets will be spilled as the movie takes a strong stance against silence as complicity. It’s a furious, deeply embittered film. Something of a slow burn (pun intended) with a deliberately downbeat opening act, but one that becomes a roaring fire of catharsis, particularly for Alice.
French helmsman Sébastien Vaniček – who drew some attention with his creepy crawly ridden Infested – uses his stab at the franchise to resurrect some of the excesses of the New French Extremity wave of two decades ago. It’s not just the levels of blood-letting or their grizzly execution (extreme even for this series), but the imposing, dour mood that oppresses everything. This is a grey, rainy, wintry Evil Dead movie, hanging heavy with its grief and repression. Only lighting the touch paper can bring any warmth to proceedings. In this sense Evil Dead Burn makes a dark argument for releasing all of your old family secrets. Driven half-crazy as her family is destroyed from the inside out, Susan becomes convinced that unification and equilibrium will finally bring peace. They’ll only be a family against once they’re all Deadites. It’s the far, nihilistic end of group therapy.
Vaniček wants to weed out the faint-hearted early on, and when the family pet gets involved, those battlelines are clearly drawn for the audience. Granted, this gives us something new to play with – an ultimately underused Deadite dog! – but it might prove too much for some. There are other bum notes worth acknowledging. Thanks to their relative proximity in the opening act, the protracted deaths of the film’s only two Black males gives rise to a worrying sense of visceral dislike that Vaniček is wise to move far away from for the remainder of the picture. Intended or not, it suggests itself. And then there’s Maude Davey as Alzheimer’s afflicted grandmother Polly, whose dementia is played for a few easy laughs in a movie that works better when displaying a deadpan and jet-black sense of humour. ‘Silly Polly’ feels like a mandated request to play to the cheap seats in a movie that otherwise relishes a far drier streak of absurdism.
But, once Evil Dead Burn has settled in at the family plot, the ratcheting escalation is masterfully played out. In a strong cast Yacoub, Shand and Wright are the particular stand-outs. With a look and bearing similar to that of Melissa Barrera, Yacoub’s Alice is an easy win for the film, which is almost over-eager to put her through a gauntlet of pain to get her to reconcile the demons of her relationship. Setting what she needs to do in stone, Burn literally and physically places her at her lowest and asks her to reach her highest. And, in it’s smouldering finale, confronts the complexity of survivor’s rage, twisted as it is around the ashes of love (playing the wedding video on the wall during the housebound carnage is profoundly sad). Shand, meanwhile, makes Edgar the scariest family member; skin-headed, gruff and powerful. But they’re all scary and menacing in their ways. As the film reduces Alice’s allies within the house, it takes on the feel of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or even the video game Resident Evil: Biohazard as she battles against the mad and the disorientating in a desperate bid to survive.
Evil Dead Burn is morbid, anti-family, resoundingly misanthropic in many ways as it reflects back at us our fallibility. It particularly asks questions about men’s propensity for violence against women, over and above violence against other men. It isn’t at all flattering. Stabbing these things close-quarters in a belligerent, embittered attempt to fight back brings out an extended, torturous sense of catharsis that this viewer found deeply affecting. I wonder if this entry will garner a devout following the way films like Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me and Rob Zombie’s Halloween II have, by people who feel that – for all the darkness involved, fuck, because of it – they’ve been truly understood on screen.
A horror movie of genuine horrors that revels in the darkness before gunning for the light. If Evil Dead Wrath is even half what Vaniček has wrought here, I’ll be racing back to the woodshed. This is my Evil Dead.
The Lost Highway Hotel 