Pedro (Ezequiel Rodríguez) and Jimmy (Demián Salomon) follow the sound of gunshots one night leading them to a small rural town.  In the morning, they find what they were after; Uriel, a young man who is bloated and covered in boils, grown ill from carrying the reincarnation of evil itself.  Working with Ruiz (Luis Ziembrowski), the landowner, to remove Uriel from the town and kill the demon that lives inside of him, things go terribly wrong as they realize too late that Urial has fallen out of the bed of the truck used to transport him and is lost somewhere in the miles of desolate countryside.  Deciding that he had been moved far enough away from the home to pose an immediate threat, Ruiz returns to the farmhouse, but Pedro and Jimmy are unsure, and they rush to try and save their family from the demon that has been unleashed into the world only to discover that humans are powerless against the wiles of the devil. 

From Argentina, Demián Rugna writes and directs the Spanish-language folk horror When Evil Lurks.  The 99-minute demon hunt debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival ahead of its limited theatrical release in the United States from IFC Films before it was made widely available on Shudder.  Rugna blends folk concepts in the script with modern flair while relying on a lot of practical horror effects to create a truly unique and harrowing vision that is certainly gruesome but undeniably thrilling. At once a road movie, at once an exorcism tale, When Evil Lurks is an audacious trip through hell that will thrill even those who are most versed in the tropes of the genre and feel there is nothing new left to see. Rugna will shock and delight with how quickly and effortlessly he cuts down to the bone. 

There is a dense mythology that pumps through the world that Rugna builds, and he places the onus on the audience to keep up as the exposition is short and he seldom returns to it.  Thankfully, the overall arc of good vs evil is adhered to, so it lets us focus more on the flourishes he creates that make When Evil Lurks such a fully realized piece.  Even though it stands alone, it feels steeped in history and the tangibility of everything – even the concepts – elevate this from just another B-movie demon hunt to one of the most brutal pictures of the year.  The lore starts early with new terms for audiences to learn.  Uriel is “rotten,” bloated and boiled not from illness but from an evil that is growing inside of him.  The severed body the brothers found on their way to Uriel’s home was that of “the cleaner,” essentially the exorcist that was sent to cleanse Uriel, but like the cleaners sent before him, he never made it to the poor farmhouse to complete his duty.  Pedro and Jimmy remove the possessed man from his home, but because they did not follow the rules – rules which we will learn later – Uriel escapes and is loose somewhere, presumably in hiding until he can give birth to the demon inside of him. 

What follows is not so much a chase or a cat-and-mouse hunt, but rather an escape as Pedro races to the city to find his family and hopes to protect them.  At his ex-wife Sabrina’s (Virginia Garofalo) house, a second brutal murder occurs – the first happens after the brothers flee the farmhouse; a visceral encounter with an axe – this time involving the family dog and their young daughter.  Possessed by the demon, the dog attacks the girl, and Rugna, with a reliance on practical effects, instructs Mariano Suárez to not turn his camera away as the dog rips and tears at the stand-in doll.  The clashing sound and the jolting camera before it settles on the attack is enough to make one jump after the already tense buildup, and then to sit and witness the carnage is nothing short of stomach-churning.  Eventually, Pedro flees with his two sons, the youngest Santi (Marcelo Michinaux), and the older, Jamie (Emilio Vodanovich) who is also autistic.  Meanwhile, Jimmy picks up their mother, Sara (Paula Rubinsztein) who, in her confusion and demand of answers from her sons, will help us put some of the puzzle pieces of what we just saw together to begin forming a picture of what When Evil Lurks is heading towards. 

Between Sara telling Santino a nursery rhyme about the 7 rules of defending oneself against evil, and a reunion between Jimmy and an old flame, Mirtha (Silvina Sabater), we finally feel prepared to enter the third act.  The showdown in the schoolhouse between Uriel, or rather the demon that lives inside of him, and Mirtha and Pedro is the most conventional aspect of the film, but even still, Rugna embraces and enhances the tropes of the genre to create a chilling finale.  His army of creepy kids itches at memories of Guillermo del Toro’s wonderful The Devil’s Backbone (2001) as they plead with increasing severity to leave the school and them alone.  Tricking Pedro, they get Mirtha, who we discover to be a cleaner, by herself so they can dispatch with her in a bloody fashion.  Uriel, buried amongst the bodies of the teachers that have been hidden under the floorboards and covered in lye, finally gives birth to the evil that he had been harboring. Taking the form of a pale-skinned boy, he shuffles out of the school and into the daw, the schoolchildren following him close behind; “Evil likes children, and children like evil.”   

Returning to Mirtha’s to reunite with his family, Pedro instead is greeted by the bloody scene from the night before.  Sabrina, possessed, stole Santi from his bed and wandered the countryside eating the boy that she held in her arms.  Jimmy had run the demon woman over in his car when he saw her and returned to find that Sara had been torn apart by Sabrina in the same way the cleaner whose corpse, they encountered nights before, had been.  Jimmy, Pedro, and Jamie return to their home, defeated, but together. 

Rugna’s film takes audiences on a gnarly tour of the Argentinian countryside that, while bleak, is still wondrously shot.  The dirty dusty look of it all makes this fresh concept feel established, like something imbued into our collective memories as a nursery rhyme or an urban legend is.  The production designer team of Valería Bistagnino and Tomás Eloy Muñoz help scout great locations for the chaos to unfold and both Rodríguez and Salomon capture a rugged and desperate tone throughout in their performances.  This undeniably strong effort, though, is not without some cause for concern.  There is a lot that is introduced about how this demon works that some of the smaller nuances may not always be clear for instance, how it passes to the dog through Pedro’s infected clothing, yet it does not affect Pedro.  It also is unclear what those who have come into contact with Urial are faced with; are they possessed?  Turning rotten?  Will they also bring about a demon?  To be fair to the script, the English subtitle track is not always the most natural, so it is possible these nuances of lore got quite literally lost in translation.  Further, there is talk about how Jamie is safe from the demon because his autism makes his brain too confusing for the demon to control.  Ultimately, this proves not to be true as the final reveal is that Jamie is the one who killed Sara, not Sabrina, but the entire approach to his condition feels incredibly obtuse, especially in 2023.    

When Evil Lurks is a bold and impressive work featuring some of the grisliest sequences in recent memory while, importantly, relying on plot and narrative instead of devolving into straight-up torture porn.  It is unafraid to push boundaries and conventions, but the most impressive aspect, especially in today’s state of the genre, is that it is mean. It has no regard for its characters as it punishes them in unrelenting and extreme ways, not just physically but emotionally and psychologically as well. There is a case to be made that When Evil Lurks is a metaphor for disease, possibly Covid-19, and the demon is one of misinformation that leads to dangerous public conclusions and tears families apart, but at its festering and rotten core, the film is a gnarly and gnashing horror film that will turn stomachs with some of the most searing and upsetting imagery and scenarios in modern horror.