Film Review: When Evil Lurks

When Evil Lurks answers our horror prayers

Content warnings: discussions of domestic violence and parental kidnapping.

Spoilers to follow.

If you’ve been a little underwhelmed by this year’s horror movie offerings, fret no more. Director Demián Rugna has followed up his acclaimed chiller Terrified with an even more vicious paranormal odyssey.

When Evil Lurks is set in an alternate version of contemporary Argentina where demons are not only believed in, but officially acknowledged, and the government even has a protocol on how to resolve cases of possession.

In this case, due to corruption or incompetence, a possession has gone un-dealt with, the victim left to fester for a year. (Rugna combines zombie and demon lore; his possessed putrefy). Realizing the man is about to die, three desperate locals resort to dumping his bloated body outside town limits.

Everything spirals out of control from there, kicking off a wild occult road movie that left my jaw on the floor on more than one occasion.

When it becomes clear that their botched disposal has unleashed, rather than contained the demon, brothers Pedro and Jimmy scramble to collect their families and flee to the city.

For Pedro, that means kidnapping his two sons from his estranged wife. Their screaming argument works both as drama and as clever misdirection, setting the stage for a brutal shock that should be instantly iconic among horror fans.

Jimmy, meanwhile, picks up his own mother, who seems blissfully unaware of the danger they’re in. (In one scene, she warns her grandkids to never to call a demon by its name, then proceeds to rattle off the name of every demon she can think of.)

Unable to outrun the undead, the brothers seek out an experienced demon-killer, who tells them they must attack the evil at its source. That means tracking down the possession victim they abandoned, who is still alive and guarded by an unlikely group of worshippers.

Rugna deftly balances grim horror and visceral gore with bleaker-than-black humour. When Evil Lurks is essentially about failure - and not noble failure either, but failure via stupidity and ego. The movie’s hardest gut-punch is the reveal that Pedro doomed his family the moment he tried to save them, his fear leading the demons right to them.

Not just his fear for their safety, it must be said. The movie doesn’t sugarcoat the fact that Pedro is a deadbeat dad, who abandoned his sons but resents their mother for building a stable life without him. His paranoia over his ex “taking” his kids from him comes back to haunt him, quite literally.

A disturbing bit of backstory – alluded to but never fully confirmed - is that Pedro lost custody rights after an attempted murder-suicide. It’s said that family annihilators kill their wives and children out of a narcissistic need to assert control, and this is what motivates Pedro’s actions throughout the film: he’s convinced himself that he is more capable than his sons’ mother and stepfather of protecting them from the crisis he caused when, in reality, they would have been safe if he’d only left them alone.

In a sense, he did kill his own kids.

When Evil Lurks gives viewers some sickening things to sit with. But you can also enjoy the movie as a thrill ride, like Evil Dead on a larger canvass.

Rugna doesn’t pull punches from any shock, whether it’s a family mowed down by a truck or a cute little girl with a hammer bludgeoning a woman to death. He revels in grotesque practical effects, lingering lovingly as his heroes drag a desiccated corpse dripping with fluids into the back of a truck. (No CGI there, Rugma informed the thrilled Midnight Madness audience at TIFF).

Conversely, Rugna avoids revealing too much about his world. We never learn what the proper method of disposing of a demon is – an intriguing device, part scientific, part, ceremonial, is shown but never used. The “rules” of dealing with the occult might very well be old wives’ tales, and the demons’ ultimate endgame is never really spelled out, allowing Rugna to shock us with their depravity, right to the final scene.

For those of us who have been thirsting for a good old fashioned hardcore horror movie, smartly written but with no pretence of good taste, When Evil Lurks will be the film to watch.

When Evil Lurks premiered at Toronto International Film Festival on September 13th. When I saw it there, some of the English subtitles had errors; mostly minor, but there was one line of dialogue that appeared particularly garbled. Hopefully those will be corrected by the time the film gets a wider release.

Review by Madison McSweeney
Twitter: @MMcSw13
Instagram: madison.mcsweeney13