Film Review: Evil Dead Burn 鬼玩人：煉獄 (2026) - USA
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critics Circle of Australia)
I rated it 8/10
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★
Support my reviews by buying me a Coffee! https://buymeacoffee.com/neofilmblog
Support our reviews by buying from official DVDs / Blu Rays at NeoFilmShop.com
There is a moment early in Evil Dead Burn when the camera simply watches a man burn. Not the quick, merciful kind of movie fire. The slow kind. The kind that makes you feel the heat on your own skin. Sébastien Vaniček understands something essential about this franchise: the dead do not merely rise. They insist.
This is the sixth feature in the long, bloody Evil Dead lineage and the second in the current wave of standalone nightmares after Evil Dead Rise. It has almost none of Sam Raimi’s carnival mischief. What it has instead is pure, concentrated meanness. A French widow named Alice (Souheila Yacoub, excellent) arrives at her late husband’s family home seeking the dull comfort of shared grief. The family does not want her. The house does not want her. Something older and hotter than either of them wants all of them.
What follows is not a story so much as a siege. One by one the relatives are claimed, and each possession feels personal, almost intimate, as if the demons have been listening to every bitter word spoken around the dinner table for years. The violence is extreme, sometimes inventive, often grotesque. Flesh does not just tear; it melts, boils, and splits under pressure. There are moments that will make even hardened horror audiences look away. Vaniček does not wink. He does not offer comic relief. He simply keeps the temperature rising until the house itself seems to sweat.
Yacoub carries the film with a quiet, exhausted resilience. She is not a final-girl archetype so much as a woman who has already survived one kind of hell and now finds herself trapped in another. Hunter Doohan, Luciane Buchanan, Tandi Wright, and the rest of the family ensemble do fine, committed work, especially as their characters begin to rot from the inside out. Special mention must go to the practical effects team. The Deadites here look and move with a nasty physicality that digital polish would have softened.
Is it as clever as Raimi’s original trilogy? No. Does it possess the delirious camera energy of those early films? Rarely. But Evil Dead Burn understands that pure, unapologetic savagery has its own power. It is a film that wants to hurt you a little, and it mostly succeeds. In an era when many horror movies dilute their cruelty with irony or self-awareness, there is something almost refreshing about a movie that simply refuses to look away from the fire.
You will not leave the theatre humming a tune. You may leave feeling slightly singed. That, I suspect, is exactly the point. (Neo, 2026)