When Evil Lurks Review - IGN (2024)

When Evil Lurks is now streaming on Shudder. This review is based on a screening at Fantastic Fest 2023.

There are feel-bad movies, and then there are immoral plunges into Hell on Earth like Demián Rugna’s extraordinary gut-puncher When Evil Lurks. If you like nihilistic horror movies that nestle in the pit of your stomach, thrashing and scratching from within like swallowed barbed wire balls, this is the bleakness you crave. Rugna follows his immensely frightening debut Terrified by reconfiguring demonic possession as a viral outbreak, proving himself to be anything but a one-trick horror director. When Evil Lurks is so malevolent, you’ll want to cleanse your television with holy water after the credits finish.

It all starts when brothers Pedro (Ezequiel Rodríguez) and Jimmy (Demián Salomón) discover a infernal infestation in a neighboring farmhouse. There’s no preamble where someone accidentally stumbles upon a cursed artifact or reads Latin from a leatherbound script – Rugna launches right into the meat of the nightmares to come as depicted by an unsightly, bloated gentleman oozing sewage-green liquids and covered in throbbing pustules. (The film’s patient zero, dubbed a “rotten.”) Pedro and Jimmy abandon their homestead and speed into the nearby city to whisk away Pedro’s children, including his autistic son Jaime (played exceptionally well by Emilio Vodanovich), but it’s too late. There’s no sympathy for Pedro, Jimmy, or their surviving family – the evil’s a-lurkin’ and everyone’s on the menu.

Rugna challenges every conceivable boundary of good taste with a fiendish grin. Elderly grannies filled with wisdom, precious little sisters wearing pajamas, slobbery canines with more rolls than a bakery display – Rugna’s ferocious villain refuses anyone or anything safety. Weaker stomachs will reject staggeringly upsetting bursts of ruthless rage involving all the above, an echo of sicko masterclasses like The Sadness, where creative inhumanity earns high marks. Rugna’s evil operates like a slasher killer as the entity hops between hosts, picking off Pedro and Jimmy’s loved ones through heavyweight shock-and-awe tactics (double-barreled shotgun blasts, high-speed vehicles, the works).

There’s nothing fancy about When Evil Lurks, which makes the hellacious onslaught of attacks that much more impressive. Rugna refuses to turn the camera away from grotesque imagery that depicts unshakable acts of violence, no matter how much you might beg. The story is a domino effect of innocents meeting stick-with-you fates that hit harder than a Mack Truck doing 100 mph, as wounds gush rivers of blood from mortal vessels cackling into the camera. Trickery abounds: Pedro can’t tell if a demon might be using Jaime's neurodivergence as a cover because devilish desires respect no boundaries; Children of the Corn-esque kiddies try to throw Pedro off the rotten’s trail. There’s also an Evil Dead influence, as the viral demon conceals itself in human bodies, manipulating their behaviors and dialogue to get a rise from other characters – they might not look like zombified Deadites, but their murderous antics are equally maniacal.

Rugna’s command over visual agony is like a feast of cursed photography. Mangled corpses are the norm, misshapen and broken by falls out of second-story windows or cracked open by self-inflicted axe wounds. The rotten’s globular physique – like a swelling water balloon filled with mucus, pus, and demonic bile – recalls Kevin Durand's Blob from X-Men Origins: Wolverine, except decayed mere seconds away from death. Rugna’s outstanding special effects team intends to startle audiences until they drop, and might very well succeed depending on your tolerance for masoch*stic horror storytelling. When Evil Lurks is a slathered-in-guts possession tale on Doom’s “Nightmare” difficulty setting that only gets worse the more Pedro and Jimmy try to escape the seemingly inescapable evil spreading like apocalyptic wildfire.

To quote The Offspring, When Evil Lurks lets the bad times roll (oh-oh-oh-oh). It’s all so despicably entertaining. Corrupted daughters hop-clap in a giddy circle while their mother lays wounded and motionless (“Evil likes children, and children like evil” is an A+ line). Quaint suburban settings become breeding grounds for uninvited hatred that refuses to let us catch our breath before the jaw-dropping brutality continues. Rugna even works folklore and mythology into the demon-killing rules followed by Jimmy and Pedro, which establishes that all-so-important dynamic in a horror film where other frantic characters ignore instructions and make things worse. There’s an overall abruptness and vicious unpredictability that keeps us on our toes and muffling our gasps the whole time. When Evil Lurks is never overcomplicated, and always foaming at the mouth with day-ruining intensity (that’s beautifully shot by cinematographer Mariano Suárez).