Streaming Availability: Shudder
This is a brand new release today so be warned, SPOILERS!!
I'm just going to warn you now, When Evil Lurks is a very depressing movie. This is shocking, this is cruel, this is upsetting. The awfulness becomes casual, unimaginable horror happening at such a fast clip as to be numbing. Before even the halfway point, When Evil Lurks has killed a small child, a dog, and a heavily pregnant woman. Put away any notions of a happy ending right now. Then stop hoping for some bittersweet conclusion or any sort of compromise. This is all going to go very badly.
I felt really shitty after seeing this movie. I feel shitty writing about it now. It is just a bad time - a very well-made bad time that is bold in ways many movies will not be.
This is the new film from Demián Rugna, an Argentinian horror director best-known for the 2017 film, Terrified. Rugna makes nasty movies where things start badly and keep getting worse. The ghosts of Terrified and the demons of When Evil Lurks prove beyond the powers of the clumsy local government or the experts to deal with. Before long, what is just a small local problem has exploded to a complete collapse of the society.
In When Evil Lurks, the main
characters' first instinct to pick up everything and run. The tragedy of
this movie is that they didn't run fast enough. Their choices are bad, but their options were never great to begin with.
When Evil Lurks has a speculative fiction premise. This is not a dystopian future, rather a near-future that seems well on its way through a dystopic process. "The time of churches has ended" we're told, and "God is dead." Nobody fully explains what this means, just those institutions no longer exist. A grandmother grasps her necklace for moral support, but there are no religious icons, instead just four children representing her grandkids. The exorcism technologies do not use religious icons but what look like astrological tools. The supernatural is not absent from life as in our world, it is everywhere. These people believe in demons with the same grim acceptance that we believe in mass shootings. The cities are full of demons, characters say. Out in rural country, normal life still exists. For how long, nobody wants to consider. The government barely functions enough to put out the demonic fires when they appear.
A demon is like a nuclear reactor melting down. When they appear, it requires special procedures, knowledgeable exorcists, and specific rules to be followed. (Don't say demons' names, don't use electricity, don't ever shoot a demon.) Unfortunately for When Evil Lurks, an exorcist, called a Cleaner has been sent - far too late - and the movie opens with his corpse discovered in two pieces. Once the demon has festered, animals go mad, people turn into zombies, and everything falls apart. This spreads like a plague, or say a global virus that's still happening now, remember that? Like here, people are too worried about their land or their profits to stop pretending that everything is fine, and before long, nothing is fine.
That leaves middle-aged brothers Pedro (Ezequiel Rodriguez) and Jimmy (Demián Salomon) to figure some kind of solution. What they come up with is not a good one. Their neighbor Uriel is possessed and has ceased to be truly a person. Rather he's a "Rotted", an enormous gross cocoon of flesh and pus, unable to move. The brother join their rich, entitled neighbor, Ruiz (Luis Ziembrowski) in dragging Uriel into their truck, where they plan to dump him a few hundred kilometers away. There he can explode and the Hell that follows can be somebody else's problem. Only, no.
Within a day, this plan fail away, Ruiz is dead, while
Pedro and Jimmy are rushing into town to grab their families and flee.
When Evil Lurks then finds itself replaying the 2005 Spielberg War of
the Worlds, with unequipped men fleeing with children they cannot take care
of. An anxious, frenetic chase to some hoped-for safety. Only God is Dead, so no Deus ex Machinas for you. Robbie is not waiting for you in Boston, Tom Cruise.
When Evil Lurks is not a tragedy about moral failings. Sure, Pedro as a lot to feel bad about, he's a divorced father living in a crummy farmhouse with his brother away from his estranged wife (Desirée Salgueiro) and sons. He is a capable person in some ways, yet all he does in When Evil Lurks is blow it. This movie starts with a bad solution and the solutions only get worse. Pedro fails to follow any instruction. It is a bit infuriating. Even when the brothers randomly find an exorcist friend, Mierta (Silvina Sabater), that bit of good luck quickly erodes away. Because again, Pedro cannot fucking listen. Not that following the stated rules seem to help much anyway.
I really like this concept of the demonic as disease. There's plenty of precedent across history with demons as illness, for example the Sri Lankan Sanni Yakuma rituals. The problem is that When Evil Lurks also sees the demonic in disabled characters. Uriel's fatness is lurid exploitation, like something out of Se7en. Pedro's autistic son (Emilio Vodanovich) becomes the next host of a demon. Whether it intended it or not When Evil Lurks show disability as a gross, oozing, difference we need to fear. Characters say repeatedly "he's not a demon, he's just different", and guess what? He eats his own grandmother. And that just sucks. That's bad.
I think When Evil Lurks is a very impressive in a lot of ways. It is well-shot, well-acted, Ezequiel Rodriguez gets to wail uncontrollably in honest emotion. There's cool ideas like "children are drawn to evil and evil is drawn to children". That climax in a school is terrifying. Yet I do not like this movie.
There is a level of misery I do not care for. When Evil Lurks passes that mark and keeps going. If it were not for the spooky ghouls that keeping things somewhat fun, it would in the area of French New Extreme, it's that bleak. But even the wackiest most shambling zombie somewhat loses its charm when it is scooping brains out of a small child's skull. A small child we know and have come to like, and even had hoped could be protected.
You want to take a shower after a movie like this. Maybe you can wash the misery out of your skin.
Next Time! Things remain really fucking bleak with a Thai-Korean collaboration, The Medium.
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