Director – Sébastien Vaniček – 2026 – New Zealand – Cert. 18 – 110m
*
A French-born widow visits her bereaved American husband’s family for his funeral, and demonic mayhem ensues – less fun than it sounds horror franchise entry is out in UK cinemas on Friday, July 10th
After her husband Will (George Pullar) is killed in a car accident, Alice (Souheila Yacoub) stays with his gathered family at their home for the funeral. She is French, and there’s a definite feeling that his family doesn’t like her very much, a situation compounded by his demise. Her late husband’s father Edgar (Errol Shand) is consumed with grief. Will’s younger brother Joseph (Hunter Doohan) and hs girlfriend Thya (Lucine Buchanon) don’t reallty know what to make of her. Her mother-in law Susan (Tandi Wright) is trapped in a desolate marriage with a man she was once passionate about. And the family’s half-senile grandmother Polly, (Maude Davie) is convinced Alice has stolen from her.
Polly’s late husband was obsessed with the Necronomicon, the fabled Book of the Dead that runs through the foundation of the Evil Dead franchise, and so it is that the family into whose proximity Alice finds herself thrust, turn, one by one, into demons.
The problem with all this, at least from the point of view of this audience member, is that while the above sounds fine on paper, watching the movie I couldn’t relate to any of the characters the way I did with Ash (Bruce Campbell in Sam Raimi’s original three films from 1981, 1987 and 1992) or the quick-witted, single parent mum in Evil Dead Rise (Lee Cronin, 2022); nor was there any feeling of liking a character and feeling some sort of irretrievable loss as they are subsumed into the ranks of the undead Deadites. I found the characters irredeembably nasty from the get go, and the non-supernatural element rather than hooking me and drawing me in, as it’s supposed to do, utterly alienated me.
There’s no denying the staging of the demonic mayhem is well up to par and highly inventive, with the location of the isolated family house well used in terms of understanding its geography. But as tips of fingers are severed in closed car door frames, people are pushed backwards onto dinner utensils in the open dishwasher rack, or the heroine has the twin poles of a car seat rest pushed through her neck, I didn’t care because I didn’t care about the characters.
Nevertheless I perservered, unexpectedly bored by the lack of any anchor to the ongoing violence and mayhem, in the hope that the film might kindle some interest in one of its characters and suddeny take flight. The demented grandmother looked promising, but her over-leaning on the idea that the deceased’s wife was stealing from her slowly wore away any possibility of my liking her.
The family matriarch looked more promising; I particularly liked the moment she savours her recent kiss with her now-Deadite husband, remarking, you haven’t kissed me like that in years. Where would this go, I wondered? Some sort of unearthly communion between the demons and the living? No, like so much here, it was a missed opportunity: it didn’t go anywhere.
Perhaps I’ll be in a minority. Perhaps others will love the gore and the bloody action here for its own sake. That element, of itself, would never do it for me. I need something else to pull me in, make me sympathetic to the characters before the demonic skullduggery starts. Here, though? None of that. The result is an Evil Dead movie that, against all expectation, bored me witless and played out as utterly flat.
Evil Dead Burn is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, July 10th.
Official Red Band Trailer: