Evil Dead Burn

Sébastien Vaniček, the French director Sam Raimi handpicked after seeing his spider movie Infested, gets the keys to the franchise and doesn't crash it. Alice, a grieving widow played by Luciane Buchanan, retreats to her late husband's isolated family home to sit with her loss. The in-laws are already there. Hunter Doohan, Souheila Yacoub and Tandi Wright round out the trapped ensemble. Then somebody finds the Book. You know the rest, or you can guess it, because the setup is the same setup it's always been since 1981. Cabin, family, mistake.

Vaniček shoots this thing like he's genuinely worried you'll walk out. The practical effects are the real deal — latex, karo syrup, actors covered in muck, the kind of texture you can't fake in a render farm. There's a dishwasher gag that a normal person would never think of and a horror director apparently thought of first thing Monday morning. He pulls off a long unbroken take that isn't just a flex, plus a broken-mirror shot that flips the geography of the scene on you. Buchanan carries the emotional through-line without ever tipping into Serious Grief Acting. And Vaniček understands the franchise's tonal contract, which is that the pain is real, the deaths are cruel, and the camera thinks all of it is a little bit funny.

Rise, from 2023, was the high-water mark and this doesn't clear it. There's more CGI than any Evil Dead should have, even used sparingly. The family-in-a-house setup is close enough to Rise's apartment-tower setup that a few beats feel like reheat. Some reviewers landed on "well-made but safe," and they aren't wrong — Vaniček proves he can hit every mark on the checklist without proving he wanted to add a new one. The first act does a lot of grief-widow scaffolding you've seen before, and the movie only really wakes up once the Book does.

If you liked Rise, or Fede Álvarez's 2013 remake, or you watched Infested and thought "give this guy a bigger budget," you're the audience. If you need your horror slow, quiet and thematically tidy — the Hereditary/Babadook lane — this'll feel like getting jumped in an alley. Squeamish viewers will tap out inside twenty minutes. Anyone who considers "brutal French horror" a compliment is home.

WORTH IT because the craft actually shows up. Vaniček isn't remixing the franchise's iconography for a Twitter audience or delivering a thesis about grief and womanhood — he's staging kills, blocking a haunted house, and making his lead actor's face do the work. It earns its themes by dramatizing them instead of announcing them. Nobody stops to explain what the movie is about. It's about a dishwasher, and a book, and how much fake blood one production can order. 71% critics, 75% audience. That's a movie that did the job, didn't oversell, and left the room clean-ish. Worth the two hours.