Evil Dead Burn (Sébastien Vanicek, 2026) Review

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“To your perfect family.” Hey kids! What do you want out of an Evil Dead movie? Well, if it's a colour scheme that looks like three-day-old porridge and weighty themes about miserable personal relationships, then you've come to the right place...

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“You need to stop meddling in our family affairs.” Alice (Souhelia Yacoub, Dune Part II) is a French woman living in America, having married Will (George Pullar), a chef and grade-A arsehole who mentally and physically abuses her with impunity. However, when Will is killed in a car crash instigated by a deadite that has been reawakened from its slumber in a nearby lake (why was it there?), Alice finds herself trapped with her horrible in-laws, who just so happen to be the descendents of Benjamin Price, who was studying Kandarian demonology. Despite knowing the danger of what he had uncovered, Price had left all of his research and notes for anyone to find and – importantly – read aloud the words you're very much supposed to not read aloud!

Retiring to Price's dilapidated old country home, Alice's troubles with the in-laws – including her mother and father in-law Susan (Tandi Wright, Pearl) and Edgar (Erroll Shand, Our Flag Means Death) – get kicked-up a notch when demonic possession seeps into home and hearth with bloody mayhem on its mind. Joining them for the torments are Alice's brother-in-law Joseph (Hunter Doohan, Wednesday), a semi-sympathetic wimp and failed writer who miraculously has a girlfriend called Thya (Luciane Buchanan, The Night Agent), and Susan's dementia-stricken mother Polly (Maude Davey, The Newsreader), as well as Max the dog.

“You are the boss, come on.” Much like it's thoroughly disappointing predecessor, ED:Burn is riddled with missed opportunities. A perfect example is when Alice is descending down the chimney to escape a couple of deadites, upon one of whom she has to use a gnarly-looking weed whacker tool to do some pruning. Surely, the Evil Dead thing to do here would be to show the full height of the chimney inside the frame and the sight of Alice being doused in gushing gore and falling body parts. But no. Infuriatingly, Vanicek pulls a Lee Cronin (director of ED:Rise) and leaves the kill shot flubbed and wasted. What we actually see is the fireplace as some blood splashes down. That's it.

ED:Rise had a nasty habit of doing the same sort of thing, such as the cheese grater moment completely dropping the ball, or the blood-gushing wood chipper scene where the protagonist doesn't get doused from head-to-toe in gooey crimson splatter so that a car instead gets splashed, and not even the obvious car to cover in gore (Sam Raimi's “classic” Oldsmobile Delta 88, as featured in all preceding Evil Dead projects) but just some random generic car.

Another example of ED:Burn's inability to utilise a set-up properly is the scene where Susan tucks her mother Polly into bed. Having reverted to a child-like state, Polly asks her daughter Susan to check under the bed for monsters. She does so and naturally there's nothing there – the monster is in the bed, after all, and that's what we're waiting for. However, what we get is a very silly attempt at 'being creepy', with Polly standing up in bed while covered in a sheet (like a ghost from an episode of Scooby Doo), and talking in a suspiciously lucid but evidently unnatural and untrustworthy manner as she beckons Susan to come closer. Completely unperturbed by this moment – despite having already witnessed several acts of demonic possession and supernatural craziness, such as her husband blasting three bullets through his own head and surviving – off she trots to have a hug and an emotional moment before the obvious truth of Polly's current state is revealed to Susan.

The emotional moment is a good one, but the sequence just doesn't work. For starters, lose the whole 'under the sheet' thing. It isn't creepy, it just looks daft. Instead, have Susan check under the bed, then have Polly drift back into a moment of lucidity (having spent the film thus far completely under the curse of dementia). This would then allow for an emotional beat to play out (the tragic and increasingly rare moments to be with the person they used to be), perhaps with Polly understanding the reversal of roles that has happened between mother and daughter before remembering how she would tuck Susan into bed. Maybe there was a little rhyme she sang while checking for monsters under Susan's childhood bed, but can't quite recall it. Susan could then act this out, checking under Polly's bed for a second time, before Polly suddenly screams in fright (has Polly been attacked by a monster above the bed?), Susan leaps up – and wham! – gets confronted with a fully possessed demon version of her mother Polly.

But no. We just get some rubbish with a bed sheet. The potential of a character with dementia – the emotional horrors that inflicts on those left to watch the unstoppable decline – combined with a deadite possession are never truly explored and, let's be honest, it's too bleak and real for this kind of movie. Indeed, Vanicek and co-screenwriter Florent Bernard's attempts to 'expand' the rules of the monster don't really work and suggest a lack of understanding in how the deadites manipulate their victims (and have an awful lot of fun doing so). For one, and this was also a problem with ED:Rise, a deadite shouldn't still have possessed eyes and a crazed look when it's trying to trick someone into thinking they're normal. In the original films the whole point was to project an illusion of human goodness and cleanliness towards the person the deadite is trying to trick – to lull them like a siren of sorts – only to pull the rug at the last minute for maximum impact and demonic delight.

For two, the notion of spreading a deadite 'infection' from a deadite to an untainted human is interesting, but is under-explored and doesn't work that well anyway. Further to this, having someone kind of hypnotised by a deadite to do their bidding feels half-inched from Bram Stoker's Dracula (i.e. the notion of a 'Familiar'), and is ultimately pointless – the deadites can do their own dirty work for themselves and that's part of the pleasure of it all for them!

“I would give anything for us to be together again.” Speaking of the deadites, those on display in ED:Burn simply don't feel like the same beasts at all, with the 'rules of the monster' turning into a muddled sludge of misunderstanding and half-baked attempts at new ideas. This is further screwed up by the film's lack of internal logic. The reason that the deadites reawaken in the first place is down to Joseph's research into his grandfather's books (all clichéd layers of scary scribbles and spooky images), but if it's all so dangerous, why didn't Benjamin destroy all the information and hide the daggers somewhere safer than a bin bag behind a couple of conspicuously wonky wooden boards? Continuing on from this staggering lack of logic, the deadites want to know where the dagger is, but don't think to bother searching for Price's copious notes in the attic – how else do they think they were resurrected in the first place?! All of this sloppiness is hindered even more by the film's weak plotting and storytelling, with the characters' goals and needs often left unclear or absent.

“Give them what they want and this ends.” The feel of Vanicek's filmmaking also seems similarly mismatched with the Evil Dead franchise. A slow-moving overhead shot during a physical battle feels like something nabbed from John Wick 4, while clunking moments of humour that brutally undercut tension or horror feel cribbed from the Judd Apatow school of comedy (if you want many more instances of 'undercut humour' that completely outstays its welcome, check out 2026's Masters of the Universe). Vanicek grabs some chances to display filmmaking flair, but none of it seems particularly appropriate here. This might sound odd considering just how out-there Sam Raimi's filmmaking style was in his Evil Dead films, but that relentlessly creative and unique style always felt more like we the viewer were being shown the events through the eyes of a demon, not a filmmaker showing off doing a 'oner', which is also the case here.

“Just fuckin' tone it down!” Themes aren't necessarily a bad thing to include in an Evil Dead movie, but they weren't necessary during Bruce Campbell's time playing Ash. The 2013 remake used a theme of drug addiction to add a layer of depth to the protagonist, provide a solid reason why she and her friends would isolate themselves in a lonely cabin in the woods (to help Mia go cold turkey), and allow for a suitable metaphor of conquering ones own inner demons that becomes a literal nightmare and an actual chainsaw-wielding battle as the sky rains blood. That is how you utilise any notion of themes in an Evil Dead movie, just enough to add some spice, but never getting in the way of totally gore-drenched demonic anarchy and, you know, being an Evil Dead movie.

ED:Burn, though, is pretty messy and heavy handed when it comes to thematics. While ED:Rise had ideas of familial abandonment and rising to the occasion, with side-themes such as the insufferably right-on daughter who was planning on attending a protest march, ED:Burn eyes-up spousal abuse and takes a sledgehammer approach that leaves the whole film feeling like an exercise in misery. Add-in a side-order of maudlin dullness, and it's no wonder any sense of anarchic fun has been sapped out of the movie as if it was some leech-covered plague victim rasping out their last breaths.

In general, the angle on spousal abuse feels a bit out-of-date now to be cutting edge (about eight years ago it would've been on-point), as we've had so many other films and television shows deal with the subject in extensive detail. ED:Burn is unfashionably late to the party, and it doesn't even know how to do the dance anyway. For one thing, Will is such an obvious arsehole from the get-go – openly berating, insulting, and physically grabbing his wife Alice in a consistently and clearly nasty manner in front of numerous eye witnesses – that you have to wonder, in 2026, how and why did nobody call him out, urge Alice to kick him to the fucking kerb, or beat the ever-loving shit out of him? There's a vague mention that Alice was somehow addicted to Will's awfulness, but this isn't developed. Indeed, Will is such a douchebag that you have to wonder why anyone at all would have anything to do with him.

Considering that the main location of the film, the run-down Price family home, is where Alice married Will (her abusive husband now back from the dead), you would expect that – as the house is literally consumed in flames – the climactic fight would happen there and then. Heaven knows, the viewer needs the film to wrap it up already, but no. Instead, for some bizarre reason, the final fight takes place at a nearby construction site that has no true narrative purpose or resonance beyond being a noisy inconvenience during the 'celebration of life' event. It's just a cheap excuse to use a jack hammer.

“We gave you this house and you let it rot.” There is something to be said for producers and franchise creators Sam Raimi, Robert Tappert, and Bruce Campbell's notion of allowing up-and-coming filmmakers to get stuck in with a horror film … but does it really fit with the Evil Dead franchise? Should it even fit? Let's be honest, the first three films and the Ash vs Evil Dead TV show all have Raimi's signature style and approach firmly embedded – it is therefore the look and feel of the Evil Dead series. The 2013 remake/reboot managed to tread a fine line, with Fede Álvarez bringing his own brash style to the project while also producing something that still very much felt like an Evil Dead movie in terms of style of tone. One might say that the extreme violence in that movie stepped outside the established boundaries of the franchise, but I would counter that: the most gruesome moments are still intended to be ghoulishly entertaining and are attached to either a deadite's thirst for bodily havoc or a character's horrified desperation to escape the pestilential grip of demonic possession (the unforgettable electric carving knife scene).

Unfortunately, Evil Dead Rise and Evil Dead Burn both feel like curious interlopers, body snatchers imitating an Evil Dead movie but getting all the little details wrong and lacking the true vim and vigour we've come to expect. Rise felt a bit desperate to be 'relevant to the kids today', and talked about being tough and gory but routinely shied away from going as far as a demon actually would. Burn, meanwhile, is one of the most depressingly dull and drab films of the 21^st Century, which is absolutely not what an Evil Dead movie should be.

Evil Dead: Burn is like Fifty Shades of Grey-Blue, Grey-Brown, and Grey-White, all congealing into a gruel-like sludge seeping between the aged floorboards of an Industrial Revolution factory as the tattered shoes of smog-choked orphans trudge back to another twelve-hour shift. An Evil Dead movie should be bold and unhinged, as if it is some kind of demon-possessed fleshy thing that has attached itself to a reel of celluloid film before thrusting into your eyeballs with a cackling sense of hellish glee. There is none of that to be found in ED:Burn, which attempts to bring the French Extreme movement (e.g. High Tension or Martyrs – both excellent films) to the Evil Dead franchise, but the culture clash doesn't blend. The focus on torture porn-like violence and the resultant agony (rebar through the ankle, fountain pen in the ear) misses the 'splat-stick' mark of the originals, while the film's needle drops are as horrendously ill-fitting as the smash-cut to a twerking bottom. Ultimately, one can't help but be continuously aware that we are watching a conventional-feeling film (replete with lame jump scares) and not an Evil Dead experience, which is what Raimi's three films and Álvarez's remake felt like.

Another considerable problem with the film is the relentless use of close-ups. Wide shots, especially those properly establishing the geography of a scene, are surprisingly rare. Perhaps this was an attempt to create a claustrophobic atmosphere, but that's weak sauce when you consider how many wide shots there are in John Carpenter's 1982 masterpiece The Thing, which routinely fills the widescreen frame with characters and locations while maintaining the most palpable sense of paranoia, isolation, and claustrophobia in a horror movie ever created. ED:Burn, however, is just a crushing exercise in one chin-to-hair close-up after another, and often when we do mercifully found ourselves in a medium-shot in the back-half of the movie, it becomes nothing but extreme shaky-cam time, so you still have sod-all idea what's going on. And that's made all the worse from the choppy editing style throughout, so rare wide shots come and go in the blink of an eye, stabbed between manic bouts of porridge-washed close-ups being machine-gunned at the audience.

Furthermore, despite often being noted for its extreme gore (which it does include), Vanicek's film frustratingly cuts away on too many occasions, or obscures the violence with a wobbly camera and a tweaked shutter speed. A lot of it wasn't that inventive, either. Yes, smashing a head in with a dislodged dishwasher door is gooey, but it's hardly the unforgettable 'fire extinguisher meets face' moment in Gaspar Noe's gruelling Irreversible. Even in Sam Raimi's very rough around the edges original The Evil Dead (with all it's true independent filmmaking quirks, slip-ups, and work-arounds), the sheer creative invention of the gore-drenched fimmaking on display was fresh and exciting and even dangerous (it was Mary Whitehouse's “number one video nasty”), but we also precisely understood the entire geography of that cabin in the woods both inside and out. There is little, if any, of that to be found in ED:Burn.

While the aforementioned principle of giving new filmmakers a great opportunity to work on an Evil Dead movie is an interesting idea, it has turned out to be a failed experiment (the success of the remake being the exception). For one thing, the established franchise aesthetic should reign supreme. We don't want copy/paste, but even the different tonal balances of Sam Raimi's three Evil Dead films are all balanced by feeling a part of a whole franchise. Rise and Burn do not achieve this, and there is little hope to be had that a 1970s-set prequel (Evil Dead: Wrath) will right the ship. At this point, the lads need a miracle, and those are very few and far between in this world nowadays.

“Go to Hell!” Despite some cool moments (e.g the expression on one deadite's face as their head slowly splits in two) and some nice little details scattered around, Evil Dead: Burn is a missed chance to overcome the disappointment of Evil Dead: Rise. But the writing was already on the wall with trailers and clips that produced nothing more than a disinterested shrug. Though it raked-in $147m at the box office against a $12m budget, Rise was bad enough, but Burn is worse (and only managed $61m against a $20m budget). For all its high-minded attempts to be on-the-pulse and tell an emotional story, Burn fumbles the ball with catastrophically uninteresting characters. You simply don't care about anyone in the film, and the whole ordeal drags on for a plodding hour and fifty minutes, far in excess of the typical 85-95 minute running time that has always suited the franchise.

Even all the bodily trauma on display (when the camera isn't looking away) can't save this flick, which feels surprisingly dull and tonally mismatched with the series. The franchise used to have a perfect score once upon a time, with four excellent movies and three seasons of an awesome TV series … but now we've got two feature-length stinkers to tarnish that legacy, with no realistic hope for the inevitable follow-up. Evil Dead: Burn is as frustrating as the way in which the cutlery caddy in the Price's dishwasher has been stacked, and as a huge fan of the Evil Dead franchise I wanted to enjoy this movie so much, just like I wanted to enjoy ED:Rise, but both films have left me sorely disappointed.