There’s more than enough cutting and slashing and decapitating for the gorehounds and at times the violence can be inventively nasty but it’s also a little too other for it to cut that deep, a little too fantastical for any injury to feel like it’s happening to a body we can recognise as human. It’s all entertainingly deranged and mercifully brief but we’re never lured from the back to the edge of our seat by any of his frantic set pieces. Why wouldn’t they just … leave? His script does a decent enough job at explaining that away – the building is in a state of disrepair and so the earthquake manages to easily affect the elevator and stairs – although given the extremity of the situation (mum turns into masochistic demon early on), one wonders if they could have tried a little harder to escape.Īs visually sleek as the film looks, and in the flattened world of cheaply cobbled together streaming content, it really does look rather pretty, Cronin never quite manages to create enough of the claustrophobic suspense such a setup requires. Cronin starts off with a nod to this, a cold open showing just that but then rewinds a day and takes us to a soon-to-be-condemned apartment building in LA, something of a challenge as a writer trying to create believable constraints for a survival horror. But family troubles are soon made insignificant when an earthquake releases a familiar cursed book and a violent struggle to stay alive ensues.Īn Evil Dead film is known for a formula so set that it served as the most obvious inspiration for Drew Goddard’s fun-poking comedy The Cabin in the Woods: a group of youths experience hell when they head to … a cabin in the woods. Beth is taking a break from life on the road to visit them, grappling with an unwanted pregnancy while Ellie deals with a recent break-up. Like his last film and for the first time within the Evil Dead series, Cronin focuses on a family unit: Beth (Lily Sullivan), sister Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland) and Ellie’s three kids.

The original hellraiser