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

You don’t have any Active Subscription.

Your active subscription(s)

Account subscription benefits alongside Premium Stories, Editorials, Opinions and more. Unlock these with Subscription

Products you've access to

Additional Subscription Benefits

Need help with your subscription?

Every inventive mutilation pulls ‘Evil Dead Burn’ closer to reinvention, yet somewhere between French Extremity and the world’s worst in-laws, it strands one of the franchise’s most tantalising almost-great films

Updated - July 13, 2026 01:16 pm IST

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

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.

‘The Invite’ movie review: A savagely funny excavation of modern love

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.