Two spooked brothers head out into the night with guns. In the woods they find a corpse. Half a corpse, in fact. They examine it closely and discuss in practical tones what might have cut a man in two. A jaguar, one of them suggests, possibly wishfully. Too clean, says the other. And on they press, to a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, where it turns out that the bisected man had an appointment to kill Uriel, a pus-filled human being grown vast on cankers and sores. Pedro (Ezequiel Rodríguez) and his brother Jimi (Demián Salomón) know exactly what this means.
The brilliant thing about the Argentinian horror movie When Evil Lurks (originally Cuando Acecha la Maldad) is that writer/director Demián Rugna never tells us what it is that the guys know. He leaves us to work it out. So we have to assemble the lore that holds movies like this together for ourselves, getting a hint there, a fragment there, until we’ve got a sketchy but workable idea of what’s going on – possession of some sort just about covers it. But possession of an odd sort, leading to the destruction, often instantaneous, of anyone who messes with the possessed.
Which Pedro and Jim and neighbour Ruiz (Luis Ziembrowski) inadvertently do, after driving the disgusting Uriel hundreds of miles away to dump him in a ditch (removing the problem rather than confronting it is one tactic, we surmise). But instead of mission accomplished, Uriel disappears off the back of the pick-up, probably having been dislodged from the moving vehicle at the moment when Ruiz swerved to avoid hitting a kid on a bicycle. If that even was a real kid on a bicycle.
Rugna’s film sutures together the personal corruption angle of The Exorcist with the contagious disease vibe of It Follows. It spices things up further by working children into the mix, some innocent, others less so. And as Pedro evacuates his entire family to go god knows where after a particularly gruesome incident, Rugna adds in a darkly humorous (laughs, grab them where you can) twist on the journey from hell with a bickering carful.
Mood comes from the fast, hot camera, with edits switching the focus from here to there, the overlapping sound design also seeding confusion and Pablo Fuu’s score adding yet more disorientation. The acting stays in a range extending from worried to terrified, with Rodríguez and Salomón both very good at this. Later, Silvina Sabater turns out to be very good at this too. She plays Mirtha, the loremeister it turns out this film does need in the end – a touch Van Helsing, though not too much. Even she isn’t entirely sure what’s afoot (thankfully) and what she does know isn’t reassuring – “Evil likes children and children like evil” is one of her pithier utterances.
Rugna knows you’ve got to get into transgressive territory to make horror really work, and does it by involving the young and “innocent”, and later one kid in particular. If the sight of a woman eating her own daughter’s brains is likely to give you pause, then pause at this point and go no further. Though, it must be said, a lot of the gruesomeness takes place in semi-shadow.
Talking of which, what a good-looking film this is. Mariano Suárez’s cinematography gives us rich, vivid views of the lush Argentinian interior, so full-bodied they’re almost comforting. And it parcels its shocks out well too, reserving a particularly nasty one for the end putting a particularly medieval spin on the concept of mental health. I’ll say no more.
Does it all add up? What happened to Uriel? Really? Even as the film starts fading to black Rugna is still dealing out lore, a factoid at a time, with blood spatter and hair and bodily detritus all over. Quite satisfying if you like this sort of thing.
When Evil Lurks – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
