After Vermins, Sébastien Vaniček with his co-author Florent Bernard on the US side to present his personal rereading of the saga Evil Dead. Sixth film of the series started by Sam Raimi, it passes after the ice remake by Fede Àlvarez in 2013 and, ten years later, the more detailed rereading Evil Dead Rise. And it's in the heat that Vaniček comes to present his burning Evil Dead Burn in the boiling rooms of the NIFFF, in Neuchâtel... Hot notice!
Loves deadites
After her husband died in a fight, Alice (the great Souheila Yacoub who plays at home in Neuchâtel) meets with his beautiful family to share a meal in memory of the deceased. If the young woman is ambivalent about this death that delivers her from a toxic grip, she will not escape a strange curse that seems to contaminate family members one after another.
A house, a handful of characters, a disaster... Evil Dead Burn enrolled in orthodoxy in the catechism preached by the father Sam Raimi. Moreover, the latter still remains at the handlettes under the producer cap alongside Bruce Campbell (alias Ash in the first Evil Dead). And as with the previous shutters, the film opens with an accompanying introduction that allows to launch (literally) the spectator into the bath of history: a game of fishing between buddies, all on a "lake placid", which logically should have put the chip in the ear of both participants... Greyish photography does not distinguish it aesthetically from the mass of current horrific productions, but quickly the director will succeed in creating an atmosphere and a tension that will electrify the feature film.
First catalyzed by some sagacious appearances in the background, the preamble quickly turns into a nightmare and launches this Evil Dead Burn in a pretty joyous maelstrom of guts. Peaches lines in mess and toy-picking hooks, the saga weapon of an additional bestiary of killing instruments, which breathe a playful side to the massacres depicted in the image.
Spiders at Necronomicon
After this fleeting introduction, the setting up of history gives Evil Dead Burn in a more classic pattern. The scenario advances its pawns and places the actress Souheila Yacoub as the keystone around which history will be built. In question and answer sessions, Vaniček claims to have wanted to distil in the saga the deeper themes, first and foremost domestic violence. Souheila Yacoub completes by stating that, for her, a committed film is not limited to sending feminist signals, which this theme of domestic violence might suggest. A feminist film, always according to his words, is above all a feature film that features female characters outside the nails. And from this point of view, Evil Dead Burn This is a fine example, with a modern heroine and badass that escapes both the cliché of the final girl with the Eighties sauce and that of the hyper-sexualized killing machine that is iconicly found in Revenge Coralie Fargeat.
But let's not lose sight of the object we're dealing with. Evil Dead Burn is above all a feature film that must be inscribed in the corpus of a mythical saga. While it is very visible that a francophone is standing behind the camera (swiss main actress, recurring francophone music, a few blinks at the hexagon in the dialogues) and that a few deeper themes pervade the feature film, the film has indeed been incubated by its creator Sam Raimi and deviates relatively little from what can be expected from the saga since its renewal in 2013. Quasi unity of place, handful of persos, and the flood of Deadit, a crescendo of violence, the recipe is not more complex and will certainly not shake a spectator accustomed to the saga.
This being said, the ascent to the tripaille flood works and places this opus at least at the level of that realized by Come on. More than a decade ago. The director of Vermins did not lose control of the tension he deployed in his first film, but with a budget that we guessed more generous and a panel of torture tools wider than the simple cheliceries of our eight-legged friends. While it is regrettable that the feature film does not allow more road trips compared to the usual frame of the saga, it is especially necessary to recognize in Vaniček a rather surprising ability to hold the arm of the studio with a reputation built in a single film. And it's already quite a feat. All that remains is to hope that the director took advantage of this American getaway to get us back, avoiding being crushed by the studios with the sauce Aja. But unless we consult the Necromony's auspices, only the future will tell us...
Some shots are really breathtaking in the movie. Vaniček's in full control of his camera and it feels. The end plan with