Evil Dead Burn Is a Grueling Hell I Would Not Choose to Revisit

Less than 30 minutes into Evil Dead Burn — the severe new entry in the storied franchise, this one directed by Sébastien Vaniček and co-written by Florent Bernard — I needed it to end. While the original three Evil Dead films, directed by Sam Raimi and anchored by star Bruce Campbell, carry an increasing sense of comedic levity amid the havoc the unalive Deadites wreak upon the world, Evil Dead Burn doubles down on the misery that has come to define the renewed entries since the 2013 film directed by Fede Álvarez. The violence starts immediately. Fish hooks rip into skin. Men are boiled alive in an unforgiving lake. Flesh melts, rips, decays, sloughs off. I found myself gobsmacked by the sheer nastiness of the film. This isn’t due to a lack of appreciation for gore and horror. I rolled into the theater wearing a Hellraiser shirt with the tagline “What’s your pleasure, sir?” My pleasure when it comes to horror is revelation, visceral physicality, and emotional release. I can enjoy horror that is silly, sensual, or scintillating or that summons deeper considerations of what it means to be alive in this humble, strange world of ours. But when the horror is overwhelmingly bleak, I need it to have a point beyond sheer cruelty.

The experience of watching Evil Dead Burn is as dismal as the experiences of its characters. It’s visually muddy with a limited color palette and a sense of darkness that makes it difficult to discern the action at times. And it certainly isn’t looking to grant any sense of release. It introduces the thrust of its story through Joseph (Hunter Doohan), a seemingly kind but in actuality dangerously passive, overburdened son of a rotten family, as he goes through his grandfather’s personal items. Tape recordings reveal that the grandfather was versed in knowledge of Deadites, hell, and that pesky Necronomicon, his notebooks brimming with peculiar imagery and an ominous mention of a blade that, if plunged into the body of a Deadite, would send their presence back to the underworld. Joseph makes the mistake of opening a package that the recordings warn should be kept hidden.

If the film had stayed rooted in Joseph’s perspective, maybe I wouldn’t have had such a confoundingly repulsive experience watching it. But its actual lead is Alice (Souheila Yacoub), a Frenchwoman unhappily married to Joseph’s older brother, Will (George Pullar). In the earliest scene that sketches out the shape of important relationships — including Joseph’s with his girlfriend, Thya (Luciane Buchanan) — they’re celebrating the youngest brother’s birthday at a popping restaurant Will owns. Will’s sharp words, his animosity, and his swift turn toward grappling Alice make it clear that their relationship isn’t just sour but outright abusive. “You bring this out in me,” Will screams at her as they argue outside with Thya and Joseph looking on uncomfortably. He insists none of the previous women in his life ever had a poor experience with him. Alice is the problem. Sure. 

Evil Dead Burn isn’t so much intrigued by the nature of Will’s abuse and how it shadows Alice’s life after his fiery death in a car accident engineered by the presence of a Deadite. Their dynamic is instead a cudgel to beat the film into an even more revolting shape. Alice becomes a vehicle for both domestic and supernatural abuse with no meat to her story beyond a few scant traits: She smokes cigarettes; has artistic leanings, especially toward photography; and desperately wants to escape her relationship with Will (and his family). But in the wake of his death, Alice is forced to return to the now-decaying home they got married in, where Will’s family lives. There, the film relishes in flashbacks that demonstrate the mistreatment she experienced with Will and in subjecting her to more abuse from his family in the present. Will’s obsessive, put-upon mother, Susan (Tandi Wright), belittles Alice, dresses her down for her attire at the funeral, and forces her to wear heels that don’t fit, leaving her feet bloody. Susan and the rest of the family, including Will and Joseph’s hard-edged, glaring father Edgar (Erroll Shand) and Susan’s dementia-stricken mother, Polly (Maude Davey), soon become Deadites, making them the worst in-laws to have.

The film brings to mind the handling of women’s stories in horror. It is the flesh and the spiritual experiences of women that have long powered this genre. Evil Dead Burn isn’t as baldly hateful toward women as the hypersuccessful, low budget Obsession. (Writer-director Curry Barker’s surprising 2026 blockbuster may be aware of noxious male entitlement and the women it leaves curdled in its wake. But its perspective tips its hand, revealing more care for the poorly acted male lead than the woman trapped by his wishful obsession in a living hell he chooses not to free her from.) But it is disinterested in the psychological and emotional effects of Alice’s experience. They’re more useful for shock and blood — Deadites cooing at Alice that she liked being abused and, better yet, deserved it.

Look, Evil Dead Burn is mostly successful at what it sets out to do: be the grimmest, most violent, most physically revolting entry in the franchise, prizing brutality in its set pieces at every turn. Can successfully gnarly gore redeem the faults in a film’s story and characterization? Evil Dead Burn is packed with blood, viscera, ear trauma, and an unnecessarily graphic tableside murder of a dog. But the answer to that question is “no.” Apart from that, the camerawork by Vanicek and cinematographer Philip Lozano is slippery; it slides and shifts at a number of angles, calling attention to itself in a way that snapped me out of the flow of certain scenes. And while most of the film is unrelentingly grim, its few stabs at dark humor — most notably the punchlines about the grandmother’s faulty memory — didn’t garner a chuckle from me.

It is evident from early on that Will’s charred corpse will return as a Deadite — though when he does, intangible visual effects give his new visage an uncanny sheen, blunting the physicality the film had previously made repugnant but adequate use of. This foul onslaught ends with a thinly drawn, ineffective ploy toward catharsis that never works. If you’re only looking for bloody, wet horror with bodies broken and bent unnaturally and traumatizing set pieces, you’ll find a few visceral thrills in Evil Dead Burn. But if you need horror to emotionally earn its nastiness when dealing with a theme as important as domestic violence, you’ll find it as soulless as the Deadites that Alice must destroy to claw her way toward an uneasy survival.

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