Evil Dead Rise

Remember the image — a holiday gone horrifically wrong on a lakeside? That opening, with cousins on a cabin trip and violence that goes properly, gleefully wrong, sets the tone. Evil Dead Rise doesn’t tease you: it lands a gut punch early and then brings the same merciless energy back into the city.

Lee Cronin keeps the running time tight — under one hour and forty minutes — and trusts the concept to do the heavy lifting. That economy matters: there’s no padding, just a few sharp setups (a curious kid, a strange book) and the pressure cooker he closes around his characters. At the centre of it is Beth — played by Lily Sullivan — who arrives as a woman with a practical problem and becomes someone willing to answer violence with whatever’s to hand. The film pairs brutal set pieces with a recognisable family crisis, and that contrast is why it still bites.

The movie begins with what looks like a separate, classic horror beat — a lakeside holiday turned gruesome — and then relocates the threat into a cramped, ordinary world. Back in the city, a sudden earthquake reveals something hidden beneath the building’s car park, and that discovery is the pivot.

Danny, one of the kids, brings the strange artefacts he finds — old records and a book — upstairs with the best of intentions: he wants to sell it to help his mother. Predictably, curiosity here does not end well.

Soon enough, the building’s power dies and an unseen force finds a host. A woman returns to her family in a trance, threatens them and then collapses in a way that pulls everyone into survival mode.

What follows is simple on paper: a group trapped by collapsed stairwells and damaged escape routes, forced to confront possession, betrayal and the limits of what they can protect.

Beth arrives already carrying real-world problems: she’s discovered she’s pregnant and has to lean on her estranged sister for help. That domestic strain gives her choices emotional weight — she isn’t fictional suffering for the sake of scares, she’s juggling a life most people recognise.

Her situation is compact and believable: Ellie has said her husband left, leaving Beth to suddenly parent three kids in L.A. alone. It’s a messy setup that the film uses to make every threat feel consequential rather than merely bloody.

When the possessions begin, Beth becomes the practical centre. She reads, she improvises, she does the homework of survival — even turning to an old set of records in search of a solution, only to learn the priest who tried to solve this before failed, and that the stakes are absolute.

In the end, Beth’s decisions — and the brutal choices she’s forced into — are what the movie is about. She and Kassie fleeing together after everything collapses isn’t just an escape shot; it’s the emotional payoff of a story that makes parental protection feel like the real horror and the real heroism.

On the surface, it’s a possession movie. Underneath, it’s a movie about family — the obligations, the resentments, the tiny compromises that make a household. Beth’s pregnancy and single-parent reality tighten every scare into something that could ruin a life.

Fear in the film isn’t abstract. It’s the fear of losing the people you’re supposed to protect, and the fear of failing at the one job that suddenly matters most. That’s why the moment an apparently familiar person returns in a trance and pleads for protection lands so hard: the scream is about responsibility as much as it is about terror.

Freedom is threaded in too. The film contrasts the idea of being free — to leave, to abandon, to decide — with the fact that choices echo through the people left behind. Ellie’s absence and return shape Beth’s world and the way violence is channelled. Mortality is never distant. The rules the characters discover are stark: past attempts to bargain have failed, and the final solutions are uncompromising. That makes the film’s horror feel inevitable and personal rather than merely supernatural spectacle.

This is a 2023 movie through and through: it’s compact, confident and unafraid to mash intense genre violence to contemporary family problems. That short, sharp runtime reflects a 2020s appetite for films that move quickly and hit hard.

The film’s instincts — take one familiar franchise element, transplant it into a new domestic setting and use the present-day pressures of family life as dramatic fuel — feel very of the decade. It’s more interested in the emotional consequences of horror than in nostalgia set dressing.

Put simply: Evil Dead Rise wears its year lightly but deliberately. It’s a modern horror that borrows an old monster and uses it to ask questions about parenting, abandonment and what we do to survive now.

The family core still lands. Beth’s problem — a lone parent dealing with complicated siblings and children — reads cleanly now, which keeps the horror anchored. That makes the film easier to rewatch: the stakes are still obvious, and sympathy is immediate.

The fear remains effective because the threats are personal. When a once-familiar person returns changed and pleading, the emotional vertigo feels true; it isn’t just a jump scare, it’s an argument about duty dressed as terror.

The claustrophobic trap — collapsed stairways, a damaged elevator and blocked fire escapes — also holds up. Physical confinement is a timeless source of suspense, and the movie uses it to amplify panic rather than as a mere setpiece.

What might divide viewers today is the bluntness of the solutions on offer. The rules the characters discover are uncompromising, which is the point, but that moral clarity isn’t to everyone’s taste.

There are images from this film that stick — the lakeside rupture, a child bringing up forbidden things, the building that turns from safe to weaponised. Those moments are the kind you see on late-night horror playlists and remember when you think of modern body-horror hybrids.

The movie also reframes the old Evil Dead playbook by putting domestic life at the centre. Beth’s discovery of pregnancy and reliance on family ties gives the franchise’s usual possession business a new emotional charge; it’s less about gory set pieces and more about what’s lost when people fail each other.

The film’s use of found records and a cursed book neatly continues the franchise’s mythos — the old priest who failed, the incantation that summons Deadites — but it’s the consequences, the ruined neighbours and the way the horrors merge into something monstrous, that linger. Finally, sequences like the creatures combining into a single, multi-limbed threat and the desperate final acts to destroy it (including a gruesome, literal shredding in a chipper) are the sort of payoffs that horror fans repeat to one another. They’re the film’s stomach-punch moments and the reason people still mention it when swapping horror-war stories.

Yes — if you want a modern horror that pairs old-school possession with a recognisable domestic crisis, this is a good place to start. Lee Cronin directs a compact 97-minute story that rarely wastes a beat, and the film’s cruelty is matched by a clear view of who it’s hurting.

Beth’s predicament — pregnant, shouldering children, pushed to extremes by her absent sister’s return — gives the violence purpose. When the building locks down and the power fails, every frantic choice feels like it could have gone either way, which keeps tension honest.

There’s a willful bluntness to the solutions the story offers: the records tell you the priest failed, the only effective remedy is total destruction, and the characters are forced into impossible acts. That unflinching approach may not be for everyone, but it’s decisive; the movie refuses evasions.

So yes, watch it. If you care about horror that trades cheap shocks for stakes that matter to people on the screen, Evil Dead Rise still bites — and it leaves you thinking about what you’d do for the family you have left.