Though both Santiago: The Camino Therapy (or Compostelle) and Evil Dead Burn are essentially Gallic, they couldn’t be more diametrically opposed pieces of filmmaking. The former is director Yann Samuell’s take on some of the challenges faced by France’s at-risk young people as seen through a progressive lens. The latter is a gory, hyperstylized interpretation of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead universe by Sébastien Vanicek — one of France’s fast-emerging horror directors. It comes with several hallmarks of the New French Extremity movement, which refers to a rash of turn-of-the-21st-century cinema marked by graphic depictions of excessive violence and wildly transgressive behavior.
The Frenchness of the films rests less on visual style than in a narrative philosophy rooted in a vague sense of nihilism. In Santiago, the director revisits his own sentimental, slightly saccharine, storytelling — think of the orphans fleeing to neutral Switzerland during World War I in The Lulus. Santiago follows two people looking for self-healing as part of a state innovation program. After high school teacher Fred (Alexandra Lamy) slaps a student in class and gets fired, she takes a job with a social welfare agency that sets troubled teens on the right path by sending them on a pilgrimage from France to Spain’s Santiago de Compostela in Galicia. Fred walks hundreds of kilometers with the angry, rebellious repeat offender Adam (Julien Le Berre). Ultimately, both arrive at mutual respect and understanding of each other.
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In Evil Dead Burn, the director steps into Raimi’s malleable and endlessly reimagined franchise in which, usually, a group of unsuspecting cabin-dwellers summon a horde of demons — Deadites — by intoning a passage from the Book of the Dead. This time around, a dysfunctional family retreats to its common homestead after the funeral of favorite son Will — Alice’s (Souheila Yacoub) abusive husband. As the mourners gather and reflect, Alice’s in-laws constantly remind her of just how much of an outsider she is, though Will’s brother Joseph (Hunter Doohan) is more empathetic. Naturally, the house is a hotbed of Deadite action, and those ghouls have no problem exploiting Alice’s insecurities and revealing the family’s deepest secrets.
Santiago recalls Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild, adapted by Jean-Marc Vallée, and Marianne Elliott’s The Salt Path in which a down-at-heel couple walks to better health and happiness. But it’s also blessed with a clear-eyed realism that makes Fred and Adam hard to like, and questions the efficacy of justice-system experiments involving physical hardship as an outlet for rage. A whiff of existential wondering about why any of this might work, why it won’t, and why it matters anyway hangs in the air over Santiago, preventing Samuell’s optimism from teetering over into outright fantasy.
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Whereas in Evil Dead Burn, Vanicek flirts with many of New French Extremity’s tropes pivoting on feminism, politics and body horror, but never truly embraces them, the exception is the film’s brutal aesthetic and not-terribly subtle metaphor for cycles of real-life domestic violence that are too often ignored.
Vanicek’s eye for horror imagery is undeniable. He makes the most of dusty hallways and dark corners, and succeeds in giving the film more than a whiff of New French Extremity’s tone. It just lacks that movement’s narrative momentum, observational bite and, in the end, its ability to start a debate.
The writer is a freelance contributor to China Daily.
