Review: ‘When Evil Lurks’ walks a dark and nihilistic path to demonic possession that dares you to try and look away

“Bleak” can often be a double-edged sword when it comes to horror, with movies that walk too far down a darkened path forgetting the number one goal of cinema is arguably to entertain first and foremost. Making you think is definitely up there, though, and Demián Rugna’s When Evil Lurks proves itself more than capable at both, without shying away from its borderline-depressing descent to the depths of madness.

Mileage may vary as to whether or not a supernatural chiller making you feel a never-ending sense of dread in the pit of your stomach from beginning to end can be deemed a positive or a negative, but when Hollywood’s regular forays into the genre are leaning more and more into franchise fare and self-awareness, Shudder’s new Argentinian nightmare comes along as both a breath of fresh air and a right hook square to the face.

Ezequiel Rodríguez and Demián Salomón’s brothers Pedro and Jimmy set the ball rolling when they discover an infestation at a nearby rural farmhouse, and When Evil Lurks wastes no time plunging the audience into the broad strokes of its setup. Inside, they find a disgusting bloated man begging to be put out of his misery, but the film’s inbuilt lore quickly establishes that killing one of the so-called “Rotten” only brings more misery.

With a curse looming over everyone who comes into contact with it, the siblings head to the city in order to retrieve Pedro’s children from his estranged ex-wife and her new husband, but it doesn’t take long for the duo to discover that while they may not have been physically followed by a malevolent force, it’s everywhere they look, and there doesn’t seem to be anything they can do to escape it.

For the most part, horror establishes a certain set of boundaries that are rarely deviated from, and one of the most prevalent is that no matter how gruesome things get onscreen, children and animals – dogs in particular – are always going to be safe. Well, you can throw that notion right out of the window when it comes to When Evil Lurks, because anything and everybody is in the firing line, and at times it’s difficult to watch. Obviously that’s the intention, and setting the stall out so early that nothing is off-limits creates an overwhelming sense of surface-level tension that Rugna seizes with a vice-like grip and never lets go of.

As the narrative progresses and more characters are introduced into the mix both centrally and on the peripherals, When Evil Lurks drip-feeds the specificities of its overarching entity and the means in which it can or can’t be stopped. Exposition is often the death of momentum in horror, but each sequence feeds directly into the next and informs precisely what’s about to happen in a way that it never comes across as the story stopping to catch its breath, making sure everyone understands what’s going on, before barreling onto its next gnarly set piece.

Suffice to say, there’s absolutely no lightness to be found throughout the film’s agonizing runtime; you know bad things are coming, Rugna knows that you know bad things are coming, and when the bad things do come, the camera staunchly refuses to pull away. Even when things are sailing smoothly (at least by the standards of When Evil Lurks) for a while, you’ll constantly feel your eyes scanning every inch of the frame in anticipation of something shattering the calm. More often than not you’ll be right to indulge that trepidation, but it does nothing to rob the shuddering bursts of violence of their impact.

Decidedly old-school and gleefully macabre in its approach to everything, Rugna’s no-frills tale of demonic dread and inevitable damnation might prove to be a lot more polarizing than its early anointment as one of the year’s best horror movies would lead you to believe, but the filmmaker’s complete and utter commitment to carnage must be commended. Those of a squeamish or sensitive disposition should stay as far away from When Evil Lurks as possible, while even some hardened gorehounds could find themselves questioning if they’ve made the right call. Whatever side of the fence you fall on, the one constant is that you haven’t seen anything like this for a long while.

There’s even a couple of sly gags inserted, but it’s a million miles away from what you’d call “comedic effect.” You know how it works, too; somebody rattles off the reasons why you shouldn’t do certain things before confronting unspeakable evil, before going on to check every single one of them off the list. As you can imagine in a tale where there’s no such thing as hilarity, the end results are hardly played out for laughs.

At this point, you can probably infer for yourself that When Evil Lurks does not have a happy ending, not even remotely close to it. However, as they say, it’s all about the journey and not the destination. The journey is a harrowing one to be sure, but the destination – if you’re made of strong enough stuff to persevere – is a horror that stands out among a crowded pack based largely on its insistence that making the people watching it as uncomfortable as humanly possible through the grisliest of means is a goal worth achieving.

On that front, When Evil Lurks knocks it clear out of the park, even if there’s a high chance you won’t be remotely interested in asking for your ball back to see it happen a second time.