Although director Sébastien Vaniček's sequel makes further appeals to an overarching organisation of these belated, Sony Pictures instalments - specifically, credit stinging developments that no-one could possibly care about - in the main Evil Dead Burn is a fine addition to the long-running spook house series originated by Sam Raimi and his elastic pals. This latest episode, set in a crumbling holiday getaway, revolves around an acute, interpersonal cruelty; a not-so-passive aggression that is premised on the poor fortune of having married into an extremely dysfunctional, middle-class clan. Like Evil Dead Rise before it then, Vaniček's film proposes the decay and destruction of a family unit as the framework for a seething, locked-up horror film. Trapped with her in-laws inside what is, essentially, a decaying mansion following the funeral of her overbearing and abusive husband, Souheila Yacoub's Alice braves dangling accusations about her suitability as a wife (and failure to become a mother), while supernatural menace takes hold in her ageing tormentors.
Despite being the third part of this new phase, Burn is bleakly humorous as opposed to slapstick funny. The film preferring to extrapolate its chills from the moment when a pencil is plunged into a bare ankle then waggled around from Raimi's original The Evil Dead rather than the massing hordes of prop skeletons seen in Army of Darkness. Vaniček and editor Maxime Caro channel the visually inventive, not to mention boundlessly energetic, mania of their dentist-hustling predecessor, depicting a human body that can become unencumbered by gravity or able to power through grievous, life-snuffing injury based on little other than pure spite. As the bodies pile up, francophone Alice slowly sloughs off the withering expectation that has been heaped upon her. She ceases her whispered English and reverts to her mother tongue, delivering scornful assessment in machine-gun bursts around dithering affines while decrepit demons saw at their trapped limbs. Burn then, through bloody violence and an equally oppressive intrafamilial brutality, comes to suggest something of the bigger budget films that followed in the wake of the New French Extremity. Vaniček's film sitting alongside works such as Alexandre Aja's The Hills Have Eyes remake, both pieces being audience-alienating updates on distinctly American properties.