‘Evil Dead Burn’ Review: Sébastien Vaniček Directs the Single Strangest Deadite Movie to Date

If you’ve ever lifted one too many weights or finished a run your legs weren’t ready for, then you know the peculiar feeling of muscle burn. Your body doesn’t just run out of energy — it starts borrowing power from anywhere it can, cycling through fuel sources in an anxious attempt to keep you moving long after a comfortable workout has become impossible.

That’s what watching Sébastien Vaniček‘s new “Evil Dead Burn” feels like.

Rather than sprinting between geysers of blood — although, there is still plenty of that — the latest entry in executive producer Sam Raimi’s mainstay zombie saga consistently shifts the type of exertion it wants from its audience. One minute you’re watching a family drama set in a rural house infused with grief and blame. Next, it’s a brutal slapstick effort soaked in bodily fluids and featuring the most violent use of an open dishwasher that cinema has ever seen.

Finally, “Evil Dead Burn” becomes an almost lyrical supernatural nightmare, lingering over moments of brutality with a dreamlike reverence that appears as inspired by French genre history as the American splatter classics that first made the Deadites famous. By the time Vaniček’s monsters are done contorting victims into inventive new shapes, the sixth “Evil Dead” goes beyond your average endurance test to enforce a mental workout that hurts — in a mostly good way!

‘Evil Dead Burn‘©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection

Not every repetition builds real artistic muscle. (Suffice to say, there are beats in this thing that could rival “Army of Darkness” for the series’ most goofy.) But few blockbuster entries have found such unusual ways to surprise audiences with ingredients they already expect. Vaniček and co-writer Florent Bernard, who fused social realism with creature-feature thrills in their breakout debut “Infested,” begin with eerily familiar mythology and a grounded tragedy.

Alice (Souheila Yacoub), our fierce and very French final girl, arrives at her late husband’s isolated family farm still carrying the weight of his death after a drunk-driving accident. What she doesn’t know — but the audience does — is that Will (George Pullar) didn’t just crash. He encountered horror’s most notorious argument against literacy in the middle of the road. 

‘Evil Dead Burn’©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection

Who read the Necronomicon this time? That bit isn’t clear at first. But the Deadite attack leaves Alice trapped with her grieving in-laws, Susan (Tandi Wright) and Edgar (Erroll Shand), who blame her for losing their son. Meanwhile, Will’s brother Joseph (Hunter Doohan) and his girlfriend Thya (Luciane Buchanan) struggle to keep the tension from completely overshadowing the funeral. Of course, with construction sounds drowning out the eulogy at the funeral home and Alice showing up to the service in purple sneakers, even sincere efforts to connect make the main characters look less like kin and more like they’re forcing together a… cult? Oh. 

Like every “Evil Dead” movie before it, Vaniček’s “Burn” ultimately argues that surviving demonic possession requires cooperating with the people around you — even if there’s typically only one survivor. But the filmmaker proves more interested in interrogating that ethos than recreating it, and few horror mythologies are better suited to exploring betrayal and regret than one built around the refusal to let the dead remain dead. Imperfect but impressive, “Burn” uses its lead actress’ striking performance to gradually arrive at an eerily compassionate conclusion: hanging on to someone you’ve already lost can become its own form of possession.

‘Evil Dead Burn’©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection

Sure, that’s an ironic takeaway for a second-generation horror sequel. But if that emotional architecture sometimes feels sturdier than the screenplay supporting it, the visual storytelling almost never does. Vaniček has an extraordinary instinct for giving recognizable imagery a unique sense of physical texture. “Infested” transformed the cramped hallways of an apartment building into an inescapable labyrinth of terror. And here, even as significant stretches of the outdoors unfold, the director manages to keep his creation claustrophobic.

The opening sequence alone — which returns audiences to the lakeside dock introduced in Lee Cronin’s “Evil Dead Rise” three years ago — almost feels like fishing for compliments. Rain turns a particularly well-cast Deadite (Greta van den Brink) into a slick, writhing blur. Then, bait, tackle, and line become the centerpiece of an opening sequence so nasty and inventive that it immediately announces Vaniček as a worthy steward of Raimi’s legacy. Gore is no longer the only tactile sensation that matters. Instead, mud, water, splintered wood, smoke, skin, and more congeal into the same revolting sensory wavelength for a result that’s occasionally cosmic. 

‘Evil Dead Burn’©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection

“Evil Dead Burn” keeps that smolder going by smartly slowing down. Raimi weaponized manic momentum in his trilogy, while Fede Álvarez favored sustained brutality in his “Evil Dead” reboot. And if Cronin delighted in architectural escalation, then Vaniček repeatedly interrupts that assembly line for carnage altogether, stretching passionate beats with slow motion, music swells, and a deep sense of contemplation that make his Deadites seem oddly sensitive. 

Watching one possessed victim repeatedly fire a gun into its own head isn’t just grotesque — it’s mournful and beautiful, even. In that sense, the ultraviolence is reframed not as spectacle but as a kind of ancient supernatural force compelled to intrude upon ordinary human grief. Those tonal swings don’t always survive the script. Certain emotional beats arrive before the audience has been given enough reason to feel them, while recurring jokes surrounding the family’s elderly matriarch (Maude Davey) edge toward a cruelty that clashes with the film‘s otherwise empathetic worldview. 

‘Evil Dead Burn’©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection

Vaniček proves more adept at choreographing emotions than writing them. Still, the very existence of those contradictions points toward what makes “Evil Dead Burn” such a fascinating franchise entry. Its central plot remains conventional, and its demonology — including a hokey expansion involving the mysterious Cult of the Wise Men — routinely functions more as a set piece than as a serious mystery. And yet, instead of becoming trapped beneath the weight of expectations, Vaniček uses those ingredients as permission to experiment.

That’s become the quiet miracle of the “Evil Dead” movies in their current form. Rather than forcing every filmmaker to imitate Raimi, the IP has evolved into one of genre’s most generous proving grounds. Each new artist inherits the same blood-soaked toy box and discovers an entirely different way to play with it. Vaniček doesn’t reinvent “Evil Dead,” but he does reinvent how an “Evil Dead” movie can feel. Whether or not that ultimately works for you, it’s the rare legacy sequel that expands the possibilities of its own franchise — and leaves you genuinely excited to see who will push themselves to the point of exhaustion next.

Grade: B

From Warner Bros. Pictures, “Evil Dead Burn” is in theaters on July 10.

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