[Film Review] Evil Dead Rise (2023)

Warning for mild spoilers

Ten years after the 2013 release of Fede Álvarez’s reimagining of Evil Dead, Lee Cronin has resurrected the franchise kicking and screaming bloody murder with Evil Dead Rise.

Cronin’s contribution to the Deadite universe initially imagined by Sam Raimi is a gorehound’s dream as it pits one family against a legion of demons hellbent on consuming the souls of an entire condemned apartment block.

Produced by OGs Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell, Evil Dead Rise stars Lily Sullivan as Beth who has reached a major crossroads in her life teching for a rock band, and attempts to seek some solace in her older sister Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland). Ellie lives with her three children Danny, Bridget and Kassie in a dilapidated building, and after having been abandoned by her partner and the children’s father, is struggling to make ends meet and find a new abode before the apartment block is demolished. After an earthquake shakes the entire city, opening up a hidden underground vault in the basement carpark of their building, Danny comes across a Necronomicon, as well as vinyl pressings of a priest reading aloud the inscriptions of the book.

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In true Evil Dead tradition, Danny plays the records of the readings and unwittingly releases the evil within, causing his mother to become possessed. As Ellie violently kills the other inhabitants of the apartments, Beth must protect her niblings from the increasingly brutal and unrelenting attacks resulting in a gut-churning bloodbath fight til the end.

Despite the original Evil Dead trilogy and the subsequent television series Ash Vs Evil Dead being of the horror-comedy subgenre, Lee Cronin has followed Álvarez’s lead and returned the Evil Dead back to its video nasty era. Evil Dead Rise is grimy, grisly and grim, with its violence and gore not only being intensely visceral, but also completely intrinsic to its DNA. The cold open is a nod to the isolated cabin setting of the original and builds up an incredible amount of tension in minutes, before its gruesome and slightly comedic payoff featuring an insufferable dudebro and his drone. Throughout Evil Dead Rise, fans are offered throwbacks to the films that have come before in a sort of ancestral dedication, linking them all as if there could be hints of a Raimi universe. 

Having also written Evil Dead Rise, Cronin has focused the narration on the struggles of motherhood, both impending and current, a recurring theme from his first feature film, the Irish folk horror The Hole In The Ground (2019). Ellie represents the cyclical nature of troubled motherhood, with hints that Beth and Ellie suffered as a result of their own mother’s behaviour. Beth is now facing her own maternal inflicted trauma, and whether she will allow herself to be possessed by it or be able to protect from this trauma, the children she finds to be in her care, a struggle which a lot of parents find themselves to be in

Evil Dead Rise is a return to unpretentious and unrestrained, gore-soaked terror for mainstream horror, bringing the franchise back to be with the maggots, in the best possible way.

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