“You brought this out in me.”

Story: After the death of her abusive husband, Alice must deal with two of the most horrific things someone can ever put themselves through; a funeral, then dinner with the in-laws. Honestly, if the deadites hadn’t shown up – thanks to dearly departed grandpa’s research – things probably would have gone similarly. But with less blood and gore. Maybe.

Genre I’d put it in: Sorta Satisfying Sequels
Release Date: 2026
Remake, Sequel, Based-On, or Original: Based on the Evil Dead series of films and TV shows.

Gotta say: The Evil Dead films are some of my favorite things in horror. The mythology, the characters, that chin. I’m not saying Burn is bad. It’s just that it could have been better. There are glimmers of greatness here, but nothing fully comes together to form a cohesive part of the series.

The best part of Burn is that amazing opening scene. Two guys fishing on a lake. Yep, that lake from Evil Dead Rise. Of course, chaos ensues. The blend of performance and storytelling serves as a delightfully spooky-gory amuse-bouche that got me hungry for more. It even paves the way nicely for the main story, as the end of that scene primes is for what’s going to happen to one of the characters – and by extension, the rest of the family – very soon. Plus, it’s got Deadite Jessica from Rise, tying this film firmly into that film’s story.

Then the main plot starts, and it’s just not as compelling. As Rise focused on family, so does Burn, but this new film doesn’t hit the same. I cared about the characters in Rise, and wanted to see them survive. There was just enough time spent with everyone before things went south, enough to develop motivations, hints of backstories and connections between everybody. That’s not the case here. We’re dumped into a crazy nightclub birthday party for Alice’s brother-in-law, Joe. Joe and his girlfriend Thya seem to like Alice, but hubby Joe – the club’s owner – seems to always find something wrong with her. This starts a chain of physical, verbal, and emotional abuse that Alice seems to be sick of. I’ve said “seems to” way too often in this paragraph, and that’s because there’s no backstory for these characters. This scene? That’s all the info we get, then Joe dies due to suspicious circumstances (that we see vividly), and onto the funeral that folks who’ve watched the trailer know intimately.

Joe’s cremation doesn’t go as planned, and dad Edgar gets to witness firsthand how the deadites get things done. At the family’s dilapidated lake house that Joe somehow inherited. (Why? We’re not told.) Edgar thinks Joe is a loser for letting the place rot (and apparently other things the film doesn’t dig into.) But hey, the night goes swimmingly, until one by one the family turns. There are hints of ties to earlier mythology, with Bruce Campbell again voicing grandpa on the reel-to-reel tapes Joe listens to. Mom Susan hates her dad for running off to join the Circle of the Wise Men, an order bent on destroying the deadites. They’d made a dagger – Ash vs. Evil Dead alert! – and as the evening progresses, it’s up to Alice to figure out where the hell that guy left the thing.

Burn has a lot of great ideas, and promises that it doesn’t fully keep. The tie-in with Ash is tantalizing, but it only serves as a borderline MacGuffin ’til the film’s final scenes. Centering the main plot on Alice as a survivor of intimate partner violence is intriguing, but it only serves as character background instead of something that Alice must deal with in order to survive. Then there’s a huge family brawl towards the end, and director Sébastien Vaniček doesn’t get the vibes right; are we supposed to have fun with this, ala Evil Dead 2? Or is it supposed to be unironically scary, ala the original film? The tone is in a sort of no-man’s land, where I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or scream. So I just stared at the screen, hoping it’d tell me. It didn’t.

As Alice, Souhelia Yacoub does a great job with what she’s given, acting terrified, horrified, and confused. Wednesday‘s Hunter Doohan injects emotional weight into Joe’s scenes, and it feels like both Yacoub and Doohan are adding emotional heft the screenplay didn’t supply. And pour one out for Max, the German shepherd that you really shouldn’t get too attached to at the start of the film. That good boi did his best, but does deepen the lore nicely. Burn has the same beautifully horrifying look as Rise, and 2013’s Evil Dead Remake, and the gore is top-notch. There’s even a nice color grading switch at the end of the film, as if the bad stuff has moved on. But that’s not enough.

This roller-coaster ride of good vs. meh makes Burn feel messy, and unfinished. Lop about ten minutes of padding out of this bad boy, and it would have been a tighter fright-fest. Subtract some of the stretched-out scenes with character building, and there’d have been something to get invested in.

As it is, it’s an adequate filler episode for the finale of this new trilogy. Yes, that final scene is something anyone who’s familiar with the mythology of these film could guess in the first quarter of the film. Sure, the mid-credit and post-credit scenes are fun for gorehounds, but don’t really do enough to justify you holding you Diet Coke in for another five minutes or so. But Evil Dead Wrath is slated to be a prequel, so these end-credits scenes only serve to create pointless cliffhangers. Burn is the kind of film that solidifies the joke that the middle film of a trilogy is often the lesser of the three.

#Protip: Once we’re brought to the lake house, keep your eyes peeled for a photo of Bruce Campbell hanging with the others along the stairs.