I can’t remember the last time a movie shocked me like When Evil Lurks does. I don’t mean the gruesome gore, per se, though there are certainly moments when I gasped at that: the film’s bloody, pus-y, visceral fleshiness — meatiness — hits like a blow more than once. Sometimes that’s because writer-director Demián Rugna has no compunction about breaking a big cinematic taboo (though there are good reasons for that, which I’ll get into). Sometimes I gasped because the Argentinian filmmaker’s fourth feature hints at a freakish, fantastical mythology that feels ancient, even primordial, like it’s a kind of terrible boogeyman story that has lingered with humanity since before the dawn of agriculture (more on that in a bit, too), though I’m pretty sure it is wholly invented for this movie.
These aspects alone would make When Evil Lurks extraordinary. But there’s so much more going on.
So yes: this is a movie that is frequently visually grotesque, and in uniquely horrific ways. That doesn’t particularly impress me. (I’m not a fan of grisly slasher movies… not that this is anything like that. It’s just that I don’t generally find “cool” or “creative” kills scary or interesting.) It’s the overt social and political context within which Rugna’s grotesquerie is taking place that is fascinating, and appalling, and so very pertinent.
The situation is this: two (adult) brothers in rural Argentina — elder Pedro (Ezequiel Rodríguez, who sometimes gives Hugh Jackman, and sometimes Bruce Campbell, and, like, wow, what a combo) and younger Jimmy (Demián Salomón, a much sweeter presence) — discover that one of their neighbors has become a “rotten,” infected with a demon trying to be born. Such a demon can be exorcised, but it needs to be done properly, by an expert called a “cleaner.” If it’s not done properly, the demon can, well, spread, like a virus. And the infected are dangerous. Rugna only very slowly reveals the rules about how to deal with rottens, and how not, and those rules run rather contrary to what we have been trained to believe from horror movies… which makes it all even more unsettling.
When Evil Lurks, then, is a new combination of the demonic-possession and infectious-zombie subgenres, and it’s nice — for terrifying values of “nice” — to feel so at-sea with a horror movie, like you genuinely cannot know what to expect or where it’s going to go. And Rugna subsumes his mixing of those subgenres under a sense of folk horror, partly in how the idea of rottens seem to be, for everyone onscreen, just background cultural noise, something everyone has known about forever. And partly in how animals — domestic pets, farm livestock — can become rottens, too. There’s a possessed goat here, and that scene reeks with an atavistic dread, a sort of unnameable unease about how we humans — animals ourselves, of course — have appropriated other creatures for our own purposes.
But the really fresh thing in Lurks is how the in-story cultural awareness of the dangers of rottens causes people to behave… and that’s all about a breakdown of trust in authority, which may be perfectly warranted, but also, far less justifiable, a breakdown in care and compassion for our communities. Rancher Ruiz (Luis Ziembrowski), another neighbor of Pedro and Jimmy, is reluctant to report the rotten to the public-health people, as is apparently the correct practice, because he presumes the government will use any excuse to take his land, and a local rotten would be a very good excuse indeed. So the three men decide to move the rotten somewhere else, hundreds of kilometers away, and dump this poor infected person, like literally on a lonely roadside, and make the rotten some other region’s problem.
That doesn’t work so well, as you might imagine, but how it spirals from there is when When Evil Lurks starts oozing 2020s zeitgeist. (All of this is in the film’s setup: I’m not spoiling anything, though I would suggest not watching the trailer before you see the film, because it does reveal some shocks that are better left for you to discover in the story.) With the exception of those with direct, firsthand experience with the rottens — Ruiz, Pedro and Jimmy, and Mirtha (Silvina Sabater), a retired cleaner and friend of Jimmy’s who gets caught up in helping them — absolutely everyone else is able to vaguely acknowledge the reality of the rottens while also denying that it could possibly be a problem here, even when the lives of their own children are risk. Heads are firmly in the sand.
That big taboo that Rugna transgresses? It’s the one that says you do not hurt children onscreen. He does that, in ways that veer from oh-shit-we-saw-that-coming to oh-no-what-the-fuck, and beyond. I cannot say what the filmmaker’s motives were with this, obviously, but I think it’s clear that his motive is not only to be offensive. Shocking makes you pay attention… and what I see is a Covid metaphor: we really just let a vascular virus that impacts every organ in the body and damages the immune system run rampant in kids with no heed of their future prospects, huh? And I see a global-warming metaphor: we really just keep heating up the atmosphere even though we’ve known for decades what a bad idea that is, huh? We cannot be offended by children being hurt in a fictional fantasy context when we’re so obviously okay with hurting actual real children now, and hurting their future prospects. What the fuck.
When Evil Lurks is a full-on experience. It is intense. It just keeps getting creepier and more disturbing. But that condemnation of shit we’re really doing right now? That should petrify us. Because the kids are gonna realize what we’ve done to them, and soon.
more films like this:
• Lamb [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV | Paramount+Showtime US | Mubi UK]
• The Mist [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV]
