Evil Dead Burn (2026)
Grief makes liars of families. Everyone stands at the funeral saying the right things about the man in the box, and nobody mentions the bruises they spent years learning to look past. Sébastien Vaniček’s Evil Dead Burn, sixth in Sam Raimi’s long-running gore parade, opens right there, in that particular silence, and for its first act I thought we were in for something properly nasty in the psychological sense as well as the physical one.
Alice (Souheila Yacoub) has just lost her husband. She travels with his brother Joseph (Hunter Doohan) and his partner Thya (Luciane Buchanan) out to the family’s crumbling, isolated house for the wake, where mother-in-law Susan (Tandi Wright) greets her with the warmth of a woman who has already decided whose fault everything was. Nobody says the marriage was unhappy. Nobody has to. Alice walks into that house already flinching, cataloguing exits the way people do when they’ve spent years needing one. Then, because this is an Evil Dead film and someone always reads the book they were told not to, the wake becomes a bloodbath.
Vaniček can direct, that much is beyond argument. His camera has patience, stalking hallways rather than rushing them, and when the violence lands it’s choreographed rather than merely thrown at the screen. The house does a fair bit of quiet work too: a rambling, dilapidated thing where every corridor seems built to trap rather than release. Whether that was intentional or just a happy accident of production design, I couldn’t say, but it suits the film either way. There’s a dishwasher sequence in here that I will be thinking about for longer than is probably healthy, and I mean that as a compliment, mostly.
Where the film loses its nerve, in my opinion, is in what it does with its own set-up. A woman trapped inside a house with the people who watched her husband hurt her and said nothing is big idea. It’s the sort of premise that could have made this the franchise’s most uncomfortable entry, ghosts almost beside the point, the real haunting being years of a family’s silence. Vaniček flirts with that, then drops it the moment the possessions kick in, settling for the reliable rhythm of chase, kill, repeat. The dagger lore and Kandarian mythology bolted on around the midpoint don’t help matters, and slow a film that would have been better served tightening its grip on the more interesting story sitting underneath all that latex.
Yacoub holds the centre well, playing a woman braced for harm long before anything supernatural turns up to provide it, which is a neat trick and one she pulls off without overplaying her hand. Wright makes Susan’s disapproval genuinely unpleasant to sit with, before the script, rather unfairly, demotes her to another body on the conveyor belt. Both deserved a screenplay with a bit more nerve to match the cast’s.
Raimi’s fingerprints are still on this thing even though he’s credited as a writer here rather than a director, and there’s a dry, self-aware humour buried under the viscera, though Vaniček uses it more sparingly than his predecessors, leaning closer to New French Extremity miserablism than Raimi’s original splatstick glee. The result is a well-made film that finds its most haunting idea, a woman who survived one house of horrors only to end up locked inside another, and then, rather like the family at the middle of it, chooses not to look at it too closely.