Evil Dead Burn is a mean fucker of an entrance in a mean fucker of a franchise. French filmmaker Sebastién Vaniček takes the bright torch of New French Extremity passed down by the likes of Alexandre Aja, Gaspar Noe and Pascal Laugier, and runs it through a goddamn wall in a brutal, unrelenting and uncomfortable new addition to a series known to make your skin crawl and your teeth hurt.
Following the death of her husband Will (George Pullar), Alice (Souheila Yacoub) joins her late partner’s family as they come together in their former country home to grieve their loss. What begins as a tense family reunion turns into Hell on earth as familiar and brutal supernatural forces, conjured by The Book of the Dead, lay siege to the family in the most despicable ways possible.
Sebastién Vaniček once went on record to the website Konbini, saying “I told the studio I want to make a nasty film, a film that hurts, from which you come away tested”. Given my exhaustion after Burn, I’d say the young director has succeeded in spades. Vaniček is going for extreme, bordering on mean spiritedness. Not only are he and co-writer Florent Bernard putting each one of these characters through proverbial and literal hell, they’re doing so in such a way that feels deeply unsettling.
Beyond the gore and supernatural depravity, there is a very real world theme of domestic abuse the runs through the DNA of the film that is extremely hard to ignore. While they don’t handle it distastefully, the kinetic nature of the violence coupled with Alice’s survival of abuse may be a bridge too far for many, and rightfully so. Burn deviates from Rise in its tone, moving more in line with Fede Alvarez’s harshness in his 2013 remake. Where Rise had moments of levity and sprinkling in some of Raimi’s pastiche of visual comedy, Vaniček opts for a more vicious, visceral and savage form of horror.
Vaniček proves to be an inventive provocateur, as the editing slices and dices through its runtime and the camera work twists, turns, flies and races all around the violence happening through the dilapidated abode. Much of the early promise we saw in the French filmmakers debut, Infested is still very much there, albeit with a bigger budget and the blessing of one of horror’s godfathers to shred our nerves at will. And shred does he just, with a gleeful depravity only a director of an Evil Dead movie can. The gore is unrelenting – one early kill in a vehicle proves to be almost unwatchable in its ruthlessness. Vaniček directs like he’s been given the keys to a decrepit Ferarri and he’s seeing just fast this thing can go.
Fast.
He is unapologetic in his own creative patriotism, weaving his own French proclivities through the film, from the music, to the visuals, right down to the characters own backstory and motivations. In fact, it’s what makes Evil Dead Burn feel like one of the more personal entries into the franchise, as Vaniček places much of his own spirit in the film, giving the lore and narrative a more distinct voice than previous instalments.
Distinct too is its raw emotion at the heart of Evil Dead Burn’s story. Again, having more in common with Alvarez’s remake, Vaniček and Bernard swap out a heroin addict for a grieving family who know no boundaries and who believe their son could do no wrong. It’s here where the film finds its soul amongst the terror as Alice is forced to navigate not just the bowels of Hell opening but the demented, dysfunctional dynamics of a grief stricken family hitting her like a tidal wave. It forces a new, surprisingly darker theme onto the franchise (if that’s even possible), moving further away from Raimi’s more comedic undertones in the original series. The film is not without it’s chuckles with grandmother Polly (Maude Davey) being the source of the comedy with her dementia hazed ramblings providing spates of troubled laughter.
Leave it to the French to deliver the most fucked up entry in the franchise. Evil Dead Burnfulfils the promise of an Evil Dead movie all too well. While it echoes what’s come before, it sits very comfortably next to the likes of Haute Tension, Martyrs and Irreversible. For a series of films known for their violent depravity, Vaniček has done the unthinkable and has made an Evil Dead film that might have gone a little too far. By no means a knock, it’s the very electricity the franchise needed before it lost its edge. Thanks to Vaniček, consider this knife well sharpened.
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