When Evil Lurks is a nightmare about contagion and paranoia that benefits from not underlining its larger socio-political ideas. Furthermore, it’s proof that Terrified writer/director Demián Rugna is a skilled genre craftsman, delivering scares at a pace that rarely allows one to catch their breath, and with enough gruesome surprises to consistently startle. In theaters Oct. 6 and on Shudder Oct. 27 (following its recent appearance in the Midnight Madness section of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival), it’s a Halloween-season thriller with bite.
In an unidentified region of Argentina, brothers Pedro (Ezequiel Rodríguez) and Jimmy (Demián Salomón) hear gunshots somewhere in the distance outside their remote farmhouse. When they investigate in the adjacent woods, they discover a body—or, more specifically, a hand and a lower torso. Beside these dismembered parts lies a case containing the components of some weird gold contraption and a file indicating that the deceased’s destination was the nearby home of elderly Maria Elena (Isabel Quinteros). There, Maria Elena confesses that she’d hired a “cleaner” to travel to her abode to deal with her son Uriel (Pablo and Gonzalo Galarza). And by deal with, I mean kill, because Uriel is a bloated, pustulant, bedridden mess of a young man, his neck swollen to inhuman proportions and gross liquid oozing out of his mouth.
Maria Elena believes Uriel is possessed by a demon, and Pedro is convinced that she’s correct. “Churches are dead, ma’am,” he tells Maria Elena, teasing a secret about the hellish world in which they now live. Pedro turns to the police, who don’t buy his claims and make mention of his past criminal trouble. As a result, he goes to see Ruiz (Luis Ziembrowski), the owner of the land upon which the brothers and Maria Elena reside, who freaks out over this news, initially decrying it as a ploy by the state to force him to sell his property. Later that evening, Ruiz visits Maria Elena’s home with his gun drawn, yet he’s dissuaded from ending Uriel’s life by the woman and her youngest son, who declare that shooting a possessed man brings about doom. Instead, Ruiz decides to do the next best thing: dump Uriel somewhere far, far away where he can’t cause them any harm.
This is an awful plan, and if it didn’t seem that way on the face of it, the effort required to get Uriel out of his abode and into Ruiz’s flatbed truck confirms it. That sequence is one of many in which Rugna earns audience squirms from the sheer squishiness of his action, even as he refuses to unduly linger on any single disgusting image. When Evil Lurks is gross and also grimly amusing, as is evidenced by the trio’s long-distance drive to dispose of their demonic problem, only to notice—shortly after swerving to miss a child in the middle of the road—that their cargo has mysteriously vanished from their vehicle. Rather than searching for their MIA passenger, Ruiz, Pedro, and Jimmy simply head home, assuming their problem is out-of-sight, out-of-mind solved.
It’s no spoiler to reveal that their problem is most definitely not solved. Animalistic The Witch menace gives way to helter-skelter Dawn of the Dead chaos, as Ruiz and his pregnant wife learn that they’re definitely not alone, and Pedro and Jimmy check in on the former’s ex-wife, her new husband, and his two sons as well as his ex’s daughter. A couple of conspicuous shots give away the agent of these folks’ impending misfortune, but not to the point of ruining the precise nature—or timing—of the carnage at hand. This scene boasts the proceedings’ biggest gasp-inducing jolt, thereby setting the tone for a second half that races into unholy territory.
Be it in the middle of nowhere or in town, Pedro and Jimmy quickly realize that there’s no outrunning the devil. Consequently, When Evil Lurks has them seek assistance in the form of Mirtha (Silvina Sabater), a mysterious acquaintance who knows the exact methods and techniques for dispatching demons. Mirtha is a plot contrivance, there to provide context about this screwy reality and details about the seven rules governing Beelzebub’s minions. Apparently, the fiends are drawn to electricity (a convenient way to force everyone to run around in the dark), and if their possessed hosts are killed by firearms, the demons merely leap into others—thereby creating a chain reaction akin to a biblical pandemic.
If When Evil Lurks falters, it’s with regards to its scripting, as the bigger picture surrounding its tale is often frustratingly fuzzy. Rugna’s screenplay admirably wants to dole out bits and pieces of information throughout the course of its mayhem, the better to keep viewers guessing. Yet a few of its revelations come so late, and in such sketchy form, that they elicit only shrugs. It’s less the narrative’s basic conception than it is its execution, although fortunately, the director finds unsettling ways to keep suspense at a feverish pitch. That peaks with Pedro and Mirtha’s climactic search for Uriel, which leads them to a school full of creepy kids straight out of Children of the Damned or Who Can Kill a Child?, and ends with suffering that Rugna orchestrates with a sure, squelchy hand.
When Evil Lurks taps into contemporary fears about communicable infection, fraying social bonds and hopelessness in the face of spreading calamity—concerns that, Rugna contends, can’t be assuaged, much less quelled, by religion. It’s not difficult to read Pedro and Jimmy’s supernatural dilemma as a metaphorical reflection of today, but the film never articulates those connections, shrewdly allowing them to bubble just beneath the blistering surface. Scares are the prime directive of Rugna’s latest, and that single-minded focus on rattling the nerves is perhaps its chief asset. Moving at a propulsive clip courtesy of a camera that moves alongside its harried protagonists, it glides over most of its storytelling speed bumps. Furthermore, it dispenses plentiful gruesomeness guaranteed to keep the gorehounds satiated—even if monstrous eating is also a part of this stomach-churning package.
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