When Evil Lurks

Something or, more accurately, someone is rotten in the state of Argentina. In this context “rotten” refers to a kind of demonic infection that consumes its host, transforming them into a vessel for evil incarnate.

When brothers Pedro (Ezequiel Rodríguez) and Jimmy (Demián Salomón) discover that a “rotten” has been festering in a nearby farmhouse — its very proximity poisoning the local livestock — they attempt to evict the victim from their land. Failing to adhere to the proper rites of exorcism, their reckless actions inadvertently trigger an epidemic of possessions across their rural community. Now they must outrun an encroaching evil as it corrupts and mutilates every man, woman, and child it is exposed to, and enlist the aid of a wizened “cleaner,” who holds the only tools that can stop this supernatural plague.

A wildly original take on satanic panic, When Evil Lurks is the latest supernatural shocker from writer-director Demián Rugna, whose last film, Terrified, similarly served up a series of finely tuned scares and grotesque nightmare imagery. Eschewing conventional exposition, Rugna trickles the unique rules and lore that define these viral possessions across the brothers’ struggle to combat the chaos, and soaks the escalating terror with a brutality that recalls the gory extremities of Lucio Fulci’s City of the Living Dead and the hopeless horror of Narciso Ibáñez Serrador’s Who Can Kill a Child?

PETER KUPLOWKSY

Official Selection, 2023 Toronto International Film Festival

Content advisory: explicit violence, horror, frightening scenes, coarse language