Evil Dead (2013)

Directed by: Fede Alvarez
Country: USA

Review: Uruguayan film director Fede Alvarez chose a remake of Sam Raimi’s horror classic “The Evil Dead”(1981) to start his career on feature film. A risky move, since remakes aren’t much appreciated and he was dealing with a very well known ‘nightmare’. The film was shot almost entirely inside a claustrophobic and haunted cabin in the middle of the woods (this remind me something!), but were the exterior scenes that caused more impact, with millions of tree branches obfuscating our vision and evil spirits lurking at each corner. For my dismay, nothing valuable was added to the visual tricks, in an approach that attempts to impress solely through the common one-at-a-time character torture. We don’t have time to know the characters in this kind of movie; it’s just a rushing journey towards the end, without much space to breath and using pretty much the same cadence of images, sounds, and violence. Alvarez tried to use everything he could to scare us – rough voices, crawling spirits, limbs being sawed, blood spreading, but the results were unchanging, with some sanguinary scenes seeming more like a skin disease or apocalyptic disaster than effectively diabolical. A well-fitted score by Roque Baños added some intensity, but this was not enough to make "Evil Dead" a remarkable or necessary remake.