When Evil Lurks Review: A Haunting, Unnerving Film That Is One Of The Year's Best

Ken Jones, OnScreen Blog Chief Film Critic

Occasionally, you come across a film that hits differently than the standard fare in its genre. When Evil Lurks is one of those films. It is a Spanish-language horror movie from Argentina that is as straightforward and grim with its horror as it gets.

Two brothers, Pedro (Ezekuiel Rodriguez) and Jaime (Demián Salomon), hear gunshots out in the woods near their home. They go out to investigate the following morning and find a gruesome scene of dismemberment and scattered pieces of some strange device. Inquiring about whether their neighbors know anything about the incident, they discover Uriel, the eldest son of a neighbor, is very sick. His mother says he has become a Rotten; someone possessed who is giving birth to a demon.

The body in the woods was a Cleaner, someone with the ability to safely kill a Rotten without the spirit passing on to others. Ignored by the local authorities, the brothers go to their landlord, Ruiz (Luis Ziembrowski), about resolving the matter themselves. However, things quickly spiral out of control, and soon, the brothers are on the run to escape a living nightmare that threatens everyone around them.

When Evil Lurks immediately recalls movies like The Evil Dead (the original, not the sequel), but with more of a slow burn to the unfolding terror, blended with It Follows or even Smile in how the evil at the heart of all of this is pursuing them after they were in its presence. The other film it reminded me of was The Exorcist, in that it is a horror movie that feels as malevolent as its content; as in, you feel like the movie itself is kind of evil instead of just being a movie about something evil.

I don’t evoke horror genre classics to set unreasonably high expectations, merely to give an idea of the feel of the film, because When Evil Lurks is doing its own thing. A lore surrounds these Rottens and Cleaners who deal with them. Rottens should not be killed with a gun; they are attracted to electricity, and Cleaners are dispatched by government authorities. All of this is not laid out clearly and concisely to the viewer, but there is enough that there is an internal logic to the world of this film.

This is a bleak and dark film. At one point, a former Cleaner tells the brothers that “God is dead” and prayer and hope will not save people from dark forces, and you believe it. Try as they might, the brothers cannot outrun this evil.

The film is saturated with an overwhelming sense of dread and impending doom, heightened by the desperation of the situation and the apathy of local officials. Pedro and Jaime, after first seeing Uriel, go straight to the police, who are entirely dismissive of them and what they are trying to tell them.

When that avenue fails, Luis is who they turn to next; his solution is merely moving Uriel to another location far away from their homes. There is a lesson in here about how it is better to deal with evil head-on rather than to pass the responsibility off to others and hope it goes away.

It is just not that easy.

The film's atmospherics are punctuated effectively by sudden bursts of violence and gore. The makeup work done on Uriel, made to look like the Gluttony Victim in Se7en brought back to life, is impressive. He looks at the same time like a living incubator and a bloated husk of a human being. The violence of the film is unrelenting and stunning. Some of the visuals of this film will haunt you.

Writer/director Demian Rugna has not been on my radar before this film, but given how impressive When Evil Lurks is, I intend to keep an eye out for whatever his next project is. He has crafted a film that horror fans will appreciate for how unsettling it is and how unnerved they may feel. It is the kind of film that sticks with you for days afterward.

It's one of the best horror films of the year, to be sure.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars