Evil Dead Burn Review – Gore, Grief, and In-Law Hell

What do you get when you hand over your beloved horror franchise to a French filmmaker? In this case, it’s Sam Raimi who entrusted his Evil Dead film series to Sébastien Vaniček, the director behind the 2023 French-language horror debut Infested. That film impressed the auteur with its intense direction, delivering pressure-cooker tension and claustrophobic dread within a confined setting. This makes him an ideal candidate to spearhead Evil Dead Burn – the sixth installment of the franchise.

Like the post-Raimi entries before it, 2013’s Evil Dead and 2023’s Evil Dead Rise, Evil Dead Burn continues the franchise’s standalone approach by introducing a new cast of characters in a different setting. Here, Vaniček embraces the New French Extremity movement, highlighting a deeply psychological yet transgressive tone and style in exploring grief and trauma that befall a family.

It begins with an accident that tragically kills William (George Pullar), the beloved son of the close-knit family. His French wife, Alice (Souheila Yacoub, whose character transformation from a bereaved and passive widow to a take-charge survivor under forced circumstances is easily the best character in this movie), attends the funeral before joining the family back home, where she and William first got married. The house, which is located in a secluded area, looks all worn-out and derelict, mirroring the family’s emotional suffering both internally and externally.

Alice’s relationship with her in-laws—particularly her late husband’s parents, Susan (Tandi Wright) and Edgar (Erroll Shand)—is strained. They resent almost everything she does, from wearing casual clothes to her husband’s funeral to not wearing her wedding ring. Joseph (Hunter Doohan), the younger sibling in the family, however, is more on the neutral side. He is being treated like an unfavored child, especially by her father, who prefers his late older brother over him. Then, everything spirals out of control as members of the family fall victim to demonic possession one by one.

Vaniček’s persistently downbeat approach to the story’s underlying family conflict, which he co-wrote with Infested’s Florent Bernard, may sound like he sucks the life out of an Evil Dead movie, leaving nothing but a strictly gloomy horror film. Thankfully, that’s not the case with Evil Dead Burn. One of the biggest pitfalls of embracing the New French Extremity movement is an overindulgence in depravity and nihilism, to the point where it becomes more exhausting than effective. Vaniček manages to strike a fine balance here between the mean-spirited intensity of European cinema and some of the quintessential Evil Dead formula. The latter is especially true with the movie’s mix of blood-soaked gore, brutality, and plenty of macabre humor. Those who are still hoping for anything-goes slapstick and gross-out cartoon energy that Raimi populated in his original Evil Dead trilogy may find this disappointing.

The comedy leans into the film’s pitch-black absurdity. As Alice grows increasingly fed up with her toxic in-laws—especially after they transform into Deadites—she’s forced to fend them off using everyday household items as weapons, giving “dealing with difficult in-laws” a hilariously twisted new meaning. Or how an otherwise ordinary family dinner descends into a barrage of insults and hostility after a Deadite possesses Edgar, manipulating his body and voice like a grotesque puppet. The humor even extends to the subversive Gremlins-like stair lift scene, where the possessed Grandma Polly (Maude Davey) finds herself strapped to the old motorized chair that moves frustratingly slow, albeit in a high-stakes scenario.

An Evil Dead movie wouldn’t be complete without a few memorable set pieces, one of which revolves around the dishwasher scene. If you think one of the unfortunate characters gets shoved by a Deadite right onto the sharp ends of the forks and knives that sit upright in the cutlery basket makes you feel the agony, wait until you see the later scene. All I can say is Vaniček doesn’t shy away from the gore. He forces you to watch the scene in its entirety rather than have his camera deliberately move off-screen.

It helps that he prioritises practical effects over CGI, even if the digital effects occasionally produce patchy results—most notably during the climactic one-on-one showdown, where they look like something lifted from the original The Terminator.

Remember to stick around for both mid-credits and post-credits scenes.

RELATED: Evil Dead Burn Had a Scene So Brutal the Director Was Forced to Cut It for an R Rating