DOA
YOu’d think New French extremity and ‘The Evil Dead’ would be a match made in heavenly hell. YOu’d be wrong.
Evil Dead Burn
Director: Sébastien Vaniček • Writers: Sébastien Vaniček, Florent Bernard
Starring: Souheila Yacoub, Tandi Wright, Hunter Doohan, Luciane Buchanan
USA • 1hr 51mins
Opens Hong Kong July 9 • III
Grade: C+
If you start Evil Dead Burn and immediately question your sanity, no. You’re not losing it; you’ve seen this before. Of course, it’s an Evil Dead movie, so of course you have, but you have seen this particular opening salvo before – in Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise in 2023. There are friends at a tranquil lake, in this case two fishing buddies, a sudden disturbance in that tranquility and then boom! A Deadite rises from the water. There’s mayhem and murder, and smash cut to another group of friends partaking in another social occasion.
Sébastien Vaniček and writer Florent Bernard made waves with the French indie creature feature Infested, also in 2023, a clever mish-mash of race relations commentary and creepy crawlie chiller with tremendous real/CG-enhanced spider freak-outs that unfairly flew under the radar. So at first blush you’d think Vaniček and Bernard would be the ideal crew to move into Dead territory, which Fede Álvarez started playing with in 2013, steering it away from Sam Raimi’s original subtext-free horror into something a bit more nuanced; something where the Deadites carry meaning like old school vampires and zombies do. Mission accomplished for Álvarez, better luck next time for Vaniček.
No cabin, house
Which doesn’t mean Vaniček lacks style, a solid command of horror imagery and a knack for exploiting negative space to maximum effect. Vaniček begins what is essentially a domestic violence … you know what, it’s not even a metaphor or allegory because it’s right there on the surface, at a boozy birthday party for Joseph (Hunter Doohan), the “loser” brother of favourite son Will (George Pullar). Also in attendance are Joseph’s girlfriend Thya (Luciane Buchanan) and Will’s French wife Alice (Souheila Yacoub), who for reasons we never figure out the brothers’ mother Susan (Tandi Wright) despises. After Will displays some classic abuser behaviour – towards Alice, towards Joseph – he storms off in a huff and gets into a fatal car wreck. Things take a Deadite turn after Will’s funeral, when the family retreats to the old homestead where the demons are stirring thanks to Joseph looking into his archaeologist grandpa’s old notes and recordings about the Necronomicon: The Book of the Dead.
Evil Dead Burn is one of the most violent movies of 2026 so far, and gives off huge New French Extremity vibes, the gross, wilfully confronting, subversive movement that originated in the late 1990s with Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day, Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl, Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi’s Baise-moi among others, and evolved (devolved?) into horror thrillers like Haute Tension,Martyrs and the best of the lot, Inside. The difference is the horror entries’ increased emphasis on ultra-gore for shock value detracted from the more pointed commentary Denis et al’s feminist discourse, body horror, politics and that classic film school motif, the monstrous other. But rather than making the characters ones to root for – or against – to empathise with or pity, Vaniček and co-writer Florent Bernard make them some combination of dull, aggravating, garden variety scum or simply dumb.
Evil Dead Burn wants us to draw parallels between Alice, Susan and Susan’s wheelchair-bound, dementia-afflicted mother Polly (Maude Davey) that the women themselves don’t even see, made glaringly obvious by the Deadites gleefully fucking with their heads. And while it does this with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, none of it really lands because Alice, the final girl, remains an enigma throughout. She’s the link that breaks the chain in cycles of violence but we never get an idea of why Susan or Polly got caught in them too – and what part Susan’s husband Edgar (Erroll Shand) had to play in passing it on to their sons. Vaniček is hyper-fixated on blood and guts, and admittedly he does it well if you can see the goop through the jump cuts and Jason Bourne shaky cam. A knock-down, drag-out fight between Joseph and the demonised Edgar, a ceaseless blur in the background as Alice scurries away, is the perfect synthesis of the film’s visual language, and probably why it’s a highlight. Too bad most of it is in the trailer. This is gore for gore’s sake, and an exercise in how nasty a movie can be; it seems to have nothing but contempt for its people. Narrative threads are left dangling, characters either never blossom (Thya shows flashes of much needed tension but winds up going nowhere) or never evolve. Adding insult to injury, the forced credit stingers work hard to graft the story onto Rise, and perhaps lead into Francis Galluppi’s Evil Dead Wrath (coming 2028!). Galluppi’s The Last Stop in Yuma County was one of the great hidden noir gems of 2023, and if past patterns repeat, we’ll get a more stylised thriller, hopefully set in the desert, and an entirely new tone for the Deadites, in the way Álvarez recast them for the 2010s. This one’s for completists only.