EVIL DEAD RISE - Mark Reviews Movies

Evil Dead Rise, Warner Bros. Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 20, 2023

There's something particularly sinister about the threat of Evil Dead Rise, the newest entry in that always-shifting franchise that began in 1981. Sam Raimi's original three films went from fairly straightforward horror in the first film to the equivalents of live-action cartoons founded on horror elements with the two sequels, and as for the 2013 attempt to remake the one that started it all and reboot the series, it was mostly a nasty exercise in graphic mutilation and other forms of bloodletting.

Writer/director Lee Cronin, who's wholly new to these movies, finds a fairly strong center position between the violent, gory excesses of the series and its goofy humor. This one is occasionally funny, in that it understands payoff and punchline, as well as complete surprise, within a very twisted context, but it's primarily a demented ride through a string of scares and all sorts grisly, gruesome sights. On that level, it's effectively balanced in its tone and quite effective as a constantly moving thriller, but the story's foundation as a tale about a family on the verge of collapse gives it a degree of dramatic and emotional heft that's both surprising and much appreciated.

Cronin pulls a bit of a bait-and-switch at the start, giving us a prologue that's essentially what we expect from an installment in this franchise. A trio of people is at a cabin in the woods for a getaway. The setup, from the architectural intrigue of the triangular-framed cabin to the quick establishment of a couple branches of conflict, is fairly detailed for what amounts to a completely throwaway gag aimed at our expectations (The opening shot, which employs what looks to be the series' trademarked demonic perspective but is actually something else, should be a major clue), so we'll leave it there to be discovered.

The real plot revolves around an eccentric family living in an old-fashioned Los Angeles high-rise apartment building. Beth (Lily Sullivan), who's often traveling as a guitar technician—not a groupie, as she insists anytime the term is raised—for a rock band, has come home to visit her sister and the sister's children. Also, Beth is pregnant after yet another "mistake," for which she again wants help from her older sister Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland).

Meanwhile, Ellie, a tattoo artist covered in ink herself, is busy raising three kids—now on her own. Beth would have known that if she had answered Ellie's phone calls or listened to her messages two months prior, when the sister's husband decided he had enough of family life, but she didn't.

Cronin's screenplay quickly establishes the complications within this family, but it also gives us a sturdy sense of how very little of that matters to these characters. They are a family, after all, and a pleasantly weird one, at that—with Beth's nephew Danny (Morgan Davies) mixing music on turntables, elder niece Bridget (Gabrielle Echols) possessing a tough attitude, and younger niece Kassie (Nell Fisher) making a weapon out of a stick and a severed doll head.

Anyway, little of this matters in terms of the plot, which finds the kids discovering the not-so-fabled Book of Dead beneath the building's parking garage following an earthquake, with Danny accidentally unleashing a demon by playing a recording of a priest reading from the evil tome. All of it matters significantly, though, in how Cronin takes this time and makes this effort to give a sense of the family at their best and their most troubled. When the awakened demon possesses Ellie, the stakes here feel much higher than otherwise might have been without that time and effort. Because the family unit and their relationships feel real enough, the results also take on a genuine air of mourning and tragedy for what's inevitably about to unfold.

This isn't to suggest the film is too serious and filled with despair—just that it allows those moments, such as a character taking a final breath to apologize for failing, to exist within the midst of some bloody, demented entertainment. In that regard, Cronin puts on a real show of smartly staged, finely paced, and typically brutal sequences.

They're pretty much unrelenting, too. The threat is always right there, in the form of a demon trying to tempt its host's children out of safety, or spreading, as we learn while watching a character eat a wine glass (A close-up of shards of glass passing down the victim's throat appropriately wince-inducing, which is the point).

Some of the highlights include a multi-party, back-and-forth standoff in the apartment hallway, which is seen exclusively through the wide-angle perspective of a door's peephole, and the unseen payoff to the realization that there's another way into the apartment. There are plenty of smaller payoffs, as well, with random tools or unlikely weapons being scattered about in the first act and the demon Ellie's initial introduction to the family, which describes an unnaturally monstrous bond that takes shape for the climax.

Yes, Evil Dead Rise is violent and gore-filled, but it also has a warped sense of humor (The path of a particular eyeball, for example, is especially so) and is assembled with considerable skill (Plus, unlike the makers of the previous movie in the series, Cronin knows when to cut away from or only suggest certain moments of violence). The real horror here, though, isn't in the destruction of appendages, limbs, and bodies in various ways. It's in watching the bonds of this family be tested and destroyed amidst all of the carnage.

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