Evil Dead Rise (2023)

Evil Dead Rise arrives as a sequel, a continuation, and a family reunion of the worst possible kind. Lee Cronin sets the action in a crumbling Los Angeles apartment building, where two estranged sisters, Ellie and Beth, are forced into a primal battle against flesh-possessing demons. The film is loud, wet, and committed to practical carnage. Its casting offers two female leads and a trans male actor in a supporting role, which gives the ensemble a modest representational texture. The film does not foreground identity, however. It simply lets these performers inhabit the meat grinder. That restraint keeps the cultural temperature low.

The story leans on motherhood, sisterhood, and maternal survival. Ellie is a mother undone by possession. Beth is a pregnant woman trying to protect children who are not hers. These are sturdy horror engines, and the film uses them to generate dread, not doctrine. There is no explicit feminist program here, no LGBTQ storyline, no racial commentary, no climate sermon despite the convenient earthquake, no eat-the-rich satire, no body-positivity message, no neurodivergence theme, and no revisionist history. Body horror abounds, but it aims to disgust, not to affirm. The film has no interest in the modern cultural checklist, and the checklist, in turn, has little to say about it.

The remainder is a sequel that wants to drench the audience in fake blood and send them home uneasy. The sermonizing instinct is absent. Nobody pauses the demonic mayhem to explain the correct politics of the moment. The camera worships the wood chipper, the elevator of blood, the severed head. It is an honest piece of grindhouse craftsmanship. For those of us who grade social consciousness with a straight face, this is a thin vintage. A few notes of representation, a faint maternal hum, and then silence. The cellar is mostly empty. That is not a flaw in the film. It is simply the classification.