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All is not well in the family.
Following in the tradition of the newer series entries, the 2013 remake and Evil Dead Rise, Burns takes its gore and scares seriously. No time for the silly stuff. This is a mean movie. One about terrible people meeting even more gruesome fates.
After the death of restaurateur Will (George Pullar), his family, made up of brother Joseph (Hunter Doohan), his girlfriend Thya (Luciane Buchanan), parents Susan (Tandi Wright) and Edgar (Erroll Shand), grandmother Polly (Maude Davey), and Will's wife Alice (Souhelia Yacoub), meet at the familial lake house. Soon after, the possessed bloodshed begins alongside a host of uncovered trauma.
The film, more than anything else, seems to want to be a vehicle for as much gore as it can get away with. There is an attempt to make some kind of commentary. Told pretty much only through flashbacks and vague references to the spousal abuse of Alice at the hands of Will, thus separating her character from the rest of the family, who seem not to care very much about the intimate violence. Something can be drawn here about generational trauma, abuse, the deadite versions of the cast not seeming too far off from their already demonstrated behaviour. Now, to make a movie about terrible things happening to terrible people is one thing. But it is another to focus only on the terrible things, and not on the people.
The film feels hollow on the inside, with the emotional and commentary core as thin as a thread; it's present but cuts off to nowhere meaningful, nor does it add to the conversation around the topic. The rest of it is held together with some string, making references to old lore of the Necronomicon, to remind us that, yes, this is not simply a bloodied-up Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, but an Evil Dead movie. Sure to tick off all the boxes, we have a creepy house in a wooded area? Check. Tape recorder cautioning against any mythic chanting? How else would we know. Now, make sure to trap any unruly deadites in the basement. Have a random Indiana Jones homage, a fan-service chainsaw fakeout, and set it all to those Raimi swoops, sweeps, and dollies.
It seems to fit more comfortably into the canon of the horror remake, that sudden burst of them from the 2000s. It has the chaotic editing and squelchy-sounding dinner scene of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, the blood of the Rob Zombie Halloween, and some of the utterly confounding transitions from the Saw movies (my personal favorite in Burn being a smash cut from someone getting hit by a car to a closeup of a woman twerking on the camera). Of course, the ending is filled with the red wash from the ending of the Evil Dead remake, as a nice touch. A good reprieve from the deadite-grey colours of the rest of the film. French director Sébastien Vaniček's biggest inspiration seems to come from his own country's new extremity movement. Many of the gore scenes seem to call upon predecessors like Haute Tension or À l'intérieur. The presence of French cinema here is undeniable, especially in our French héroïne, Alice.
Deserved praise goes to the film's cast, many of whom play dual roles as their undead self. Special attention goes to Erroll Shand's utterly ghoulish deadite. I can imagine the physical preparation that would have gone on to achieve the creepy, monstrous movements the ensemble seems to have down perfectly. If anything, Burn is a solid case study in the physicality of horror performances. They also deliver on some solid moments of tension, especially on the number of moments they lurk menacingly in the background.
Is Evil Dead Burn an Evil Dead movie? Yes, technically. Is it a particularly good one? Up to you (admittedly, my favourite of the series is Army of Darkness, so take that into account). Gore? Plenty. Classic Evil Dead lore? Sure, with the addition of a new spooky cult. Okay, why not? Is it interesting, though? That's the problem. The core of what makes it engaging is largely absent. For the hardcore Evil Dead fans, it might be good enough.
