Remy: JANE LEVY’S GAME CHANGING PERFORMANCE
Jane Levy as Mia in this movie was about as perfect a casting choice I had ever seen, but if you’d seen her films before this, you would NOT have expected her performance (she was in Fun Size, and that is pretty much it) – but my GOD does she embrace the Mia character.
For those who don’t know, the rewrite casts her as a heroine addict, going up to the cabin (which is now in Weymouth, Ma, where I grew up and was tormented by demons, making this all even more perfect to me) and that idea of having her going through withdrawals is genius. When the madness starts, and she is warning everyone, they all think it is her trying to leave the intervention, so no one believes her. That scene, when she comes in from the woods and is trying to warn her brother, the look in her eyes of pure terror, was maybe the most palpable look and feeling of terror I had ever seen an actor portray, outside of Shelly Duvall in The Shining. But once she slips, all that innocence and nativity is gone, replaced with GENUINE EVIL. I won’t get into the kills, because I want Matt to have some cool shit to talk about, but man, from the french kiss to the (dare I say it), chainsaw, Evil Dead was just brutal cinema at its finest.
Extra Remy Thought:
All the nods Alvarez’s film makes to the original shows just how much love it has for Raimi’s Evil Dead and for the fans. When I saw Mia in the beginning, sitting on the old beater from the first film, still parked there, something big hit me. Holy shit, this is the same universe and same timeline. Which of course, leads to the big post-credit reveal, which I will leave to Matt to talk about.
