Review: WHEN EVIL LURKS Is A Brutal, Bleak Masterpiece

You've never seen a possession movie like this before.

I am very aware that when I write about a movie I have the possibility of ruining the experience for you. I can reveal too many details in the review, which takes away some of the fun of a first viewing. But that isn’t my main concern - my main concern is overhyping a movie, getting so positive about it that your experience is ruined because the reality can never match up to what was in your brain.

Today I am willing to take that risk. Today I am going to just take off the guardrails and I’m going to gush about a movie that I think every horror fan needs to see, and needs to see now. I’m not going to hold back or mince my words or put a ton of qualifiers in here. I’m just going to tell you that When Evil Lurks is absolutely incredible and made ma excited and engaged in its world in a way that no horror movie has in years and years.

First off: you’ll hear this is a possession movie. That’s technically correct, but it does not do the film justice. This isn’t a bunch of priests sitting in a bedroom waving around crucifixes. It’s a possession movie, yes, but in the same way that Evil Dead is a possession movie. In fact Evil Dead is one of the touchstones for this movie, I believe - not tonally, but in terms of gonzo elements and fresh thinking about existing horror tropes.

In the world of When Evil Lurks demons are real. They’ve come to Earth and have been possessing people for years. The churches have died off, as the presence of sheer evil among the people has destroyed their belief in a benevolent God. There are emergency plans in place for whan someone in a community gets possessed - becomes a rotten, as they say - because possession isn’t a simple one person problem. The demon seeks to get out of its host and infect others, and so when an infected appears in your community everybody has to shut everything down.

There are rules, seven of them. Everybody knows these rules, and they’re perfectly odd, in the way that all folklore is perfectly odd. One of my favorite aspects of the movie is that the rules preclude the use of modern conveniences when the evil is present, as the shadows of electric lights are places where the evil can hide, and killing a possessed with a gun serves only to curse you.

In the backwoods of Argentina there are two brothers, Pedro and Jimmy, and they get unfortunately wrapped up in a situation with a rotten. The victim is like Brendan Fraser’s Whale, if the Whale were constantly oozing disgusting pus from every pore. The guy is swollen and rotting from within, and he’s been like that a year, because in a world where there are possessed people the institutions dedicated to dealing with them - in this case specialists called cleaners - end up falling victim to the laziness and corruption of regular people.

So these two guys, one who looks like Argentinean Lucas Haas and one who looks so much like Argentinean Hugh Jackman I spent half the movie expecting him to break out in song, are not the brightest fellows. They have their own problems. But they mean well, and so they get involved in a rash decision to deal with the rotten. You can’t kill it, which would just unleash the demon, so they load it in the back of a truck and drive it hundreds of kilometers away from their town. It’s someone else’s problem now, they reason.

They’re wrong.

What happens next you need to discover for yourself, but I’ll tell you this - it’s exceptionally gory, it’s full of escalating tension and it’s bleak as hell. The tension in this movie is really interesting, because it isn’t the kind of tension that you get from the lead up to a jump scare. Rather, it’s the kind of tension you get in the moment between when someone says they’re going to show you some fucked up video and when the video actually loads. The movie is full of this feeling of “They won’t go there, will they?” and they go there every single time.

What’s fun about When Evil Lurks is the journey you go on - the film begins mysterious and then picks up steam as it turns into the early stages of a zombie/disaster movie. Then it slows down and becomes a slow march towards doom. Every step of the way it’s relentless, and writer/director Demián Rugna pulls no punches whatsoever. The image on the poster, of a woman about to plunge an axe into her own head? It comes early in the movie and it isn’t even close to the most grotesquely memorable moment in the movie.

In fact I have to say - this is a movie for the real ones. This is not for casual horror fans, for the people who think Scream is the height of the genre. This is for the people who grew up on Romero and Joe D’Amato (I’m comparing gore here, not skill level or talent). But beyond the splatter and brains, When Evil Lurks is an incredibly dark movie, a movie designed to make you feel bad and unsettled. This one isn’t about catharsis or healing your grief trauma or all the rest of the stuff modern “elevated genre” movies are supposed to do - it’s about hitting you with an unrestrained and escalating bleakness.

But it’s not mean, and I think this is important. In fact it’s not just bleak for the sake of being bleak - I believe this movie is about living in a post-pandemic world. In the world of When Evil Lurks a terrible infectious disease is amongst the characters and everybody just kind of carries on their lives as if nothing had happened. There are rules to follow but everyone kind of blithely ignores them half the time, or they half-ass them, like someone wearing a mask under their nose. People routinely make awful decisions and then are very surprised when things don’t turn out well for them. All of this reflects the world we live in now - hell, literally now when a COVID spike is happening and I went to the movie theater without a mask on, and no one else had a mask on either.

What sets When Evil Lurks apart from other recent films, besides the dedication to being over the top as often as possible, is the incredible worldbuilding that Rugna does. He slips a lot of it into the background, just making it a part of the everyday experience of the characters, and that’s what lends this a richness. This is another way the movie reminds of me of Romero, who did this so well in his original Dead trilogy. I remember when i was a kid, before the days of shared universes and all that, I created a little homebrew RPG set in Romero’s Dead world. I had the urge because Romero gave us just enough perspective of the outside world to make it intriguing and yet kept his focus tight enough on the characters that what was happening beyond their house/mall/military bunker still felt mysterious and interesting and ripe for exploration. That’s Rugna’s deal here, and I want to say this - I need more films in this world. I want to see more of this place; the movie talks about how things are in the cities and I want to see that.

The movie does end with an open story strand that could be sequelized, but to be honest I’m a little less interested in that. It’s a great story strand in the movie, and the payoff, I think, is terrific, but that’s more of a plot-oriented aspect. When I say I want to see more of the When Evil Lurks world I mean I want to see other stories of regular people confronted with these strange horrors, and how they contort their lives around them to maintain a semblance of normalcy.

I absolutely loved When Evil Lurks. Regna is a major, major talent, and this is a major, major movie. It’s without a doubt the best horror movie of this year, and likely next year as well. Hell, this is one of the best movies of the year - it’s just impeccably well made, And best of all, it goes hard, both viscerally and emotionally. If you’re a horror person you must see this movie. It’s not even a question. If you’re not a horror person… well, are you up for the challenge?