Evil Dead Rise Review | Dead by Dawn, Again

A bloody good reworking of a famed horror movie franchise, Evil Dead Rise offers a refreshing, gory, and sometimes terrifying twist on a familiar concept. Although produced in part by series stalwarts Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell, writer-director Lee Cronin’s reimagining of Evil Dead lore benefits greatly from a shift in focus and location. Although it largely ignores the re-quel from director Fede Alvarez in 2013, Evil Dead Rise shares some common thematic DNA with its most immediate predecessor in that it takes the “spam in a cabin” framework and uses it as a metaphor for larger, more identifiable fears and not just as an excuse to have a bunch of possessed people, inanimate objects, and corpses running amok.

Evil Dead Rise trades in the rural Michigan cabin for a run down apartment building due for demolition in Los Angeles. On the top floor of the building – which used to be a bank – recently single mother Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland) lives with her three kids: teenage wannabe DJ Danny (Morgan Davies), socially conscious feminist teen Bridget (Gabrielle Echols), and morbidly minded youngest Kassie (Nell Fisher). On a seemingly ordinary night, Ellie is visited by her sister, Beth (Lily Sullivan), a touring guitar tech reeling from the shock of an unexpected pregnancy. While there, an earthquake rolls through, exposing the old bank vault that lies beneath the building’s parking garage. One of the kids drops through the concrete floor to investigate and comes back up with – you probably guessed it – a skin-bound copy of the cursed Book of the Dead and some spooky old records pertaining to its blood soaked history.

Naturally things escalate pretty quickly from that point, but Irish filmmaker Cronin (The Hole in the Ground) takes some time to establish a believable, lightly fraught family dynamic that will make the eventual brutality all the more gutting (both physically and emotionally) once the shit hits the fan. Instead of a bunch of vacationing friends or a bands of medieval soldiers, the demonic possessions will impact a unit based around a deeper kind of love and affection. Alvarez’s take on Evil Dead went in a similar direction by turning Raimi’s beloved material into a metaphor for the pitfalls of addiction and recovery. With Evil Dead Rise, Cronin goes a step further by examining the pressures and fears of parenthood, both impending (as in Beth’s case) and previously established.

The gambit pays off huge, with some moments of violence and terror putting both the characters and the viewers through the emotional wringer. Once characters start getting possessed, Cronin makes the viewer wonder if the demons are making things up, or if they’re simply bringing suppressed feelings and anxieties to the surface. Cronin’s cast plays on these themes brilliantly and digging deep within themselves for a rare example of a gorefest that has some performative meat on its bones. Sutherland’s performance is balanced, gleefully unhinged (once her character goes full on evil), and physically demanding. Sullivan’s hero is tough, sympathetic, and appropriately conflicted. And all of the young actors deserve special praise here because they’re forced to do things rarely seen in major horror movies these days. It’s exceptionally rare to see hardcore horror putting kids in severely dangerous and gory situations, but Evil Dead Rise does just that, and all three of the young performers deliver noteworthy work beyond their years.

There are some questions early on that arise from moving the setting to an urban location – How hard could it be to get out of there, really? If this is happening primarily on one floor, what’s happening in the rest of the building? – but for the most part Cronin works on keeping things rigidly contained. Sometimes it’s hard to believe that characters in one room of Ellie’s apartment could be completely unaware of what’s happening just on the other side of the wall, but Cronin has a knack for keeping things claustrophobic, intense, and constantly moving. And while there are some obvious nods to Raimi’s trilogy of classics (most notably a few uses of the all-but-patented zooming “Raimi-cam”), Cronin carves out his own sense of style. Much like Raimi’s films, Evil Dead Rise has a spirit of low budget ingenuity, bursting with dark humour and an impressive amount of movement. Cameras are placed in unique locations (including great use of a peephole), and Cronin has found a way to make a candlelit film set amid a blackout look visually accomplished.

But if viewers don’t care as much about the craft, story, and performances and just want to get to the gore, they won’t be disappointed, either. Once the buckets of plasma, viscera, and internal organs start flowing, Evil Dead Rise becomes relentless in its pursuit of bodily harm and dismemberment, utilizing everything from broken glass to baby doll heads to tattoo guns to cheese graters to accomplish its nasty tasks (in addition to the two signature weapons from the franchise, of course). It might not be the overall scariest or bloodiest entry in the branching franchise, but Evil Dead Rise still goes harder than anything else out there in mainstream horror at the moment. For some, that will be enough. For those who want just a touch more from their splatterfests, Evil Dead Rise is just as happy to oblige.

Evil Dead Rise opens in theatres everywhere on Friday, April 21, 2023.