Somewhere in the middle of “Evil Dead Burn,” a possessed father gets trapped inside a moving vehicle with his family, and the movie turns every single component of that car into a murder weapon, the seatbelt, the airbag, the sunroof, the headrest, all of it, one after another, in a sequence so mechanically inventive that I actually laughed out loud, the good kind of laugh, that means okay, you got me. For about four minutes, “Evil Dead Burn” is the movie I wanted it to be.
That’s the whole problem in one sentence, really. Sebastian Vanicek’s contribution to this stubbornly un-killable franchise shows up during a genuinely strong run for smart horror “Backrooms,” “Obsession,” and “Leviticus” all managed to be vicious and clever about it this year. “Burn” only wants the vicious part. It treats the clever part like an afterthought, something that happens by accident in the car scene and then gets abandoned everywhere else.
Here’s what I mean by abandoned. Someone on this production decided to drain nearly all the color out of the film, and I kept sitting there waiting for that choice to justify itself for the washed-out grays to build some kind of creeping dread, the way desaturation can when a director actually means it. Instead the whole movie just goes flat. Even the blood looks wrong, dark and muddy instead of the lurid red this franchise usually trades in.
Pair that with editing that stumbles over its own cuts, slow-motion inserted at exactly the moments that don’t need it, and a score that never once finds a pulse, and you get ninety minutes where I was constantly aware of the seams. That’s the real failure here, not the violence, which this franchise has always trafficked in, but the fact that I never stopped noticing the filmmaking long enough to be scared by it.
The story itself is basically a family holiday from hell, if your family already hated each other before the demons showed up. It opens at a nightclub owned by Will (George Pullar), who’s celebrating his birthday by handing his brother Joseph (Hunter Doohan) an absurdly expensive pen a gift that’s really a threat, a not-so-subtle push to finally finish the book Joseph’s been stalling on.
Will’s partner Thya (Luciane Buchanan) and his wife Alice (Souheila Yacoub) watch this little performance the way people watch something they’ve seen too many times to be surprised by anymore. When Will throws a tantrum over being outshined by a better present and drives off into the night, he plows straight into a Deadite, and that’s the whole engine of the plot: a family curse waiting for an excuse to wake up.
It turns out Will and Joseph’s grandfather once dug up the only object that can actually kill a Deadite, a dagger, because there’s always a dagger, and disturbing it calls the whole swarm down on the family. Will becomes the way in. One by one, dad Edgar (Errol Shand), mom Susan (Tandi Wright), and grandma Polly (Maude Davey) get pulled under, and the film turns into a slow-motion demolition of everyone at that birthday party.
What surprised me, honestly, is how much the actors manage to salvage from this. Yacoub is doing real work as Alice, not just surviving Deadites, but visibly, physically fighting her way out of a marriage that was already a horror story long before anyone got possessed. Shand has exactly the kind of face this genre needs, and he uses it well in the early scenes, letting grief curdle into something colder right in front of us. But it’s Tandi Wright who stayed with me longest. She plays Susan as a mother who has spent decades finding reasons to excuse her son, and Wright never oversells it, she just lets that denial sit quietly under everything, even once her son has literally come back from hell. It’s a controlled, patient performance buried inside a movie that otherwise has all the patience of a chainsaw.
And look, I don’t think subtlety is what anyone signs up for with this franchise. But there’s a difference between blunt and thoughtless, and “Burn” keeps sliding toward the second one. This is a movie that takes real pleasure in mutilating elderly characters, in killing the family dog on screen, in pushing past the point where shock does anything except numb you.
I saw an earlier cut at TIFF, and even that version didn’t prepare me for roughly two dozen additional shots that made it into the final release. Make of the ratings board what you will, a film like “Obsession” needed trims to land its R, and this one apparently didn’t need to change a frame, but that’s a symptom, not the disease. The disease is a script that seems to have learned exactly the wrong lesson from 2023’s “Evil Dead Rise.” That film had teeth too, but it earned every bite. “Burn” just assumes volume equals intensity.
You can feel the film reaching for something bigger than a studio horror sequel, the isolated setting owes something to “Haute Tension,” a few of the mutilation sequences are clearly chasing “Martyrs” and I actually respect the ambition of that.
Not many multiplex horror movies admit to being influenced by the French Extremity era. But those films are brutal in service of something; the violence means to leave a mark on you psychologically, not just visually. “Burn” borrows the imagery without doing the harder work underneath it, and the result is a movie that’s proud of shots it never bothered to connect into an actual argument.
Which brings me to the thing I can’t quite shake about where this franchise is heading. What started as a gleeful warning about cabins, dumb decisions, and books bound in human skin has, over the last few installments, gotten weighed down by trauma it doesn’t always know what to do with. “Burn” wants to be a story about surviving an abuser and the family that quietly enabled him for years.
That’s not a bad idea, horror has always been good at smuggling real fear inside a monster costume. But somewhere along the way the power tools started arriving with too much homework attached, and more than once during this screening, I found myself missing the simpler pleasure of Ash cracking a joke while reloading a shotgun.
Word is there’s an “Evil Dead Wrath” already coming down the line. This franchise has clawed its way back from worse before. I just hope whoever’s driving it next remembers what actually made people love it in the first place. It was never the gore.
Parental Guidance “Evil Dead Burn”
Rating: R (pervasive graphic violence and gore, disturbing images, language)
Violence & Intensity: Extremely high. Sustained, graphic bodily horror runs through the entire film dismemberment, bifurcation, boiling, and prolonged possession-related mutilation, including violence against elderly characters and the on-screen death of a family pet. Effects are often close-up and lingering rather than suggested. Third-act VFX are visibly weaker than the practical effects but no less graphic. Not for anyone sensitive to sustained gore.
Language: Frequent strong profanity throughout, in line with R-rated horror. No significant slur use noted.
Sexual Content / Nudity: Minimal. No significant nudity or sexual content; the film’s intensity centers almost entirely on violence rather than sexuality.
Drugs, Alcohol & Smoking: Social drinking in early nightclub and birthday-party scenes. No significant drug use depicted.
Age Recommendation: 18+. A hard-R horror film built on sustained graphic violence and a domestic-abuse undercurrent that gives the carnage real emotional weight. Not appropriate for teens or younger viewers, regardless of genre familiarity.
