96 min | R | April 21, 2023 | Warner Bros. Pictures
Beth visits her estranged sister Ellie and three kids in a condemned Los Angeles high-rise. An earthquake cracks open a hidden vault, and the Book of the Dead turns a mother into a monster who wants her children dead. Cronin trades the cabin in the woods for an apartment with no way out.
The Evil Dead franchise abandons the cabin in the woods and locks itself inside a condemned Los Angeles high-rise. Beth arrives to visit her estranged sister Ellie, a single mother raising three kids in a building marked for demolition. An earthquake splits the parking garage and exposes a hidden bank vault that holds the Book of the Dead. The recordings stored with it summon a Deadite that takes Ellie first and turns the mother into the predator. Lee Cronin builds the film around a simple and ugly idea. The thing that is supposed to protect these children is now hunting them.
Alyssa Sutherland plays Ellie as a loving mother and then as something wearing her face. She holds her body wrong, smiles too wide, and recites lullabies as threats. Lily Sullivan plays Beth as a woman who fled responsibility and now has to become the protector she never wanted to be. Morgan Davies plays Danny, the teenage son whose curiosity unleashes the whole nightmare, with a guilt that curdles into terror. Gabrielle Echols plays his sister Bridget with the brittle defiance of a teenager who refuses to believe what she sees until it is too late. Nell Fisher plays the youngest, Kassie, and grounds the horror in a child who cannot grasp why her mother wants to hurt her.
Cronin directs and writes with a precise sense of how a building can become a trap. The high-rise loses power and water and turns its corridors into a vertical maze with no exit. He shoots Ellie through the apartment peephole so her possessed face bulges and distorts in the fisheye glass. The practical effects favor texture over spectacle, and the blood arrives in quantities that feel engineered rather than thrown. The sound design leans on the groan of failing pipes and the scrape of the building settling after the quake. Cronin understands that the worst sounds come from a familiar voice saying unfamiliar things.
This is a horror film about the family unit eating itself from the inside. The home stops being a shelter and becomes a kill box, and the mother stops being a refuge and becomes the threat. Cronin keeps the cast small and the geography tight so the dread never has room to dissipate. He delivers the franchise’s signature excess without losing the human stakes underneath the gore. The result is a lean and vicious entry that knows exactly what it wants to do to you. It does it without apology.