Evil Dead Burn: generously gory (review)

The director of Vermin sets Evil Dead on fire: a solidly structured film that regenerates the saga. Despite the somewhat hollow characters, it’s difficult to deny the pleasure.

After the success of Vermines, Sébastien Vaniček thought of staying in France and avoiding a move to Hollywood, for fear of being stripped of his singularity and his freedom of movement. And then Sam Raimi picked up his phone… The Evil Dead offer was too tempting but Vaniček didn’t come with his soul, or maybe only to the deadites. Evil Dead Burn is almost exactly the film of the saga that we had the right to expect from the director of Vermin: violent, gory, dry as a cudgel and filled with delightful horrific visions. With his co-writer Florent Bernard, they imagined the story of Alice (Souheila Yacoub), a battered woman whose husband has just died. The widow goes to the isolated country house of her horrible in-laws, where the late grandfather recorded his research on demons… Spoiler: it goes wrong, and rather badly.

There is no question of leaning towards elevated horror or making authoristic fuss, Sébastien Vaniček is above all there to fight it out. This frontal approach allows him to slip through a mouse hole to fully fit into the mythology while breaking the toy. The show is undeniably fun, but Evil Dead Burn slips a little more when it comes to the psychology of its characters, stuck in stereotypes. The film loses tension (a death is immediately less impressive when we don’t care about the victim) and relies a little too much on the traumas of its heroine to give substance. However, it would be foolish to deny pleasure in the face of the inventiveness of the staging (notably the dizzying games on verticality) and the talent of Souheila Yacoub, who effortlessly devours the rest of the cast. A horror queen is born.

By Sébastien Vaniček. With Souheila Yacoub, Hunter Doohan, Luciane Buchanan… Duration: 1h49. Released July 8, 2026