The concept of otherism is baked into the rotting cake of much horror cinema—the idea of a nefarious intruder corrupting, overtaking or eating away at our loved ones. It’s there in stories of demonic possession, of vampire lore, of zombie tropes and plague sagas. Nobody is safe, because nobody can be trusted to be who they say they are.
“When Evil Lurks,” the latest feature from Argentine genre maestro Demián Rugna (playing now at Regal Royal Palm Beach and other South Florida theaters), synthesizes many of these ideas into a cauldron of terror that’s entirely its own. The individual ingredients may borrow from films as diverse of “The Night of the Living Dead,” “The Exorcist,” “Children of the Corn” and “Pet Sematary,” but the movie’s internal logic and set of codes are unique and esoteric. The result is a harrowing mishmash of grindhouse-style dread that cannot be un-seen, that jettisons manipulative jump scares for a slowly unfolding nightmare tapestry that may scare off all but the genre’s most hardcore devotees.
The setting is an isolated village, a place of ostensible protection against a contagion of demonic possession that has apparently permeated the major population centers. Attracted by gunshots and by the discovery of a disemboweled body in the forest, brothers Pedro (Ezequiel Rodriguez) and Jaime (Demián Salomon) discover that a member of their community has been infected—and it’s not a pretty sight. But because one of the rules of this movie’s internal logic is that gunfire cannot end the possession—it only increases its transmissibility, while killing the host—Pedro and Jaime are challenged with relocating said host until a proper “cleaner,” armed with arcane, steampunk-style tools administered in a ritualistic process, can extinguish the evil. In other words, much like the village police, who are content to wash their hands of the problem, they pass the buck to someone else.
This turns out to be, let’s just say, a poor decision. It’s not long before this “patient zero” has spread the scourge to the community, among them Pedro’s ex-wife and children, creating the apocalyptic conditions that have reportedly spread to the wider world, and transforming everyone it touches into stealth carriers of a demonic evil.
Is the movie worth all of the gore and disgust? Does it have something to say, after all? While I admittedly spent much of “When Evil Lurks” watching the screen through my fingers, if not looking away entirely, I’m not sure it will satisfy the criteria of those seeking “elevated” horror, a la modern classics like “The Babadook,” “It Follows” or Jordan Peele’s “Us.” “When Evil Lurks” does explore themes such as the pervasiveness of xenophobia, but only in passing. And it certainly qualifies as a post-COVID horror pic, with its charged milieu of an airborne virus that, in this case, turns its victims into some combination of zombie and demon.
But mostly, writer-director Rugna eschews timely themes for more elemental ones. There is almost no character development in the movie; aside from a broken marriage, we know almost nothing about Pedro, let alone his brother. Such details would perhaps distract from the taut and lean nightmare’s story-driven propulsion.
As the infection spreads to everyone around them, we’re placed in the headspaces of two men as they’re forced to reckon with a phenomenon that the rational mind can’t accept, an insidious evil that wears the costumes of their loved ones. It seduces them, and us, through the illusions of familiarity and of innocence, which is why kids make the ideal carriers. “Evil likes children, and children like evil,” offers a demonologist introduced partway through the movie, in an assessment as chilling as it is matter-of-fact. Ultimately, I don’t know what’s scarier in “When Evil Lurks”—its words or its images.
For more of Boca magazine’s arts and entertainment coverage, click here.
