There are franchises that get rebooted, erasing everything that came before. And then there's "Evil Dead," which in forty-five years has never said "forget the previous, now this is canon." Old-timers here, each new film takes a free spot on the shelf next to the others and doesn't push anyone off. If only someone could show this trick to the makers of "Halloween," who in ten years managed to cancel their own sequels three times.

Formally, this is a stealth sequel to "Rise." Formally, because the connection is exactly one: that Jessica from the lake scene returns in the very first episode and immediately causes such a ruckus that it becomes clear - these hundred and ten minutes will be entertaining.

The director is new: Frenchman Sébastien Vaniček, who previously directed "Infested" about a spider invasion in a Parisian high-rise (if you haven't seen it, do something about that). The man knows how to make things cramped, dirty, and visceral, and he also understands perfectly that true horror begins not when the scum jumps out, but when there's no way out of the room. In "Burn," he swaps spiders for deadites, but that's a formality.

Vaniček brings with him French extreme horror in all its glory: slow, deliberate, inventive cruelty in close-up. A pen in the ear, fishhooks in the face. Bodies contorted into shapes human anatomy doesn't provide for. The meat grinder works as it should, and this is perhaps the only complaint about the film: the carnivalesque madness that made people love the "Dead" back in the eighties has finally left it.

But something else is in place - family squabbles. The franchise's recent films have been persistently digging in that garden, and "Burn" spells it out loud. A young widow comes to her late husband's relatives, and the relatives turn out to be such a nest of long-standing malice and inherited trauma that the demons from the Necronomicon look almost charming against them. The possessed on screen don't so much generate horror as voice what these people have already thought about each other for years.

I've already complained that when I watch horror, video games involuntarily start up in my head (last time, on "Hokuma", it was Silent Hill 2). Here something else started. A cursed old house, whose inhabitants are turned inside out by an evil force, searching for needed items through rooms, the feeling that every next corridor has to be fought for. Sound familiar? Of course, it's the seventh "Resident"; the same dagger capable of killing the undead - a typical quest item you have to go into the most godforsaken place to get. I don't know if it's intentional, but the hit is spot on.

In summary: a sticky, angry, and merciless film that does exactly what its title promises. Not the best entry point into the franchise, and definitely not for those expecting self-mocking jokes and a cheerful chainsaw from the "Dead." Though there will be a chainsaw. It will be so much that you'll be blown away. And if after the credits you feel more tired than the characters - don't worry, that's the point.

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