Fifty years after The Exorcist broke new ground in horror cinema, a new movie about demonic possession comes to our multiplexes that’s fully in the spirit of the late William Friedkin’s film. I’m referring, of course, to When Evil Lurks, which is much gnarlier than The Exorcist: Believer. Where David Gordon Green’s sequel has interesting ideas and no clear sense of direction, this Argentinian import knows where it’s going even if it’s fuzzy on intellectual grounds. It’s totally gross, and altogether the more interesting film.
The story begins on a farm in the remote countryside owned by brothers Pedro and Jimmy (Ezequiel Rodriguez and Demián Salomón). One night they see muzzle flashes on the neighboring land owned by Ruiz (Luis Ziembrowski), and they’re familiar enough with guns to know that the shots are coming from a handgun and not a rifle, and that five shots is too many for a game poacher to be firing. The next morning, they go over there and find the lower half of a man whose body has been bisected too neatly for him to have fallen victim to an animal attack. Ruiz doesn’t know who the corpse belongs to, but they all find one of his tenant farmers named Uriel (played by Pablo and Gonzalo Galarza, with voice by Sebastian Berta Muñiz) bloated and decomposing while still alive. Uriel begs the brothers to kill him.
The monster at work here is referred to as “the rotten,” a demon that possesses humans and animals alike and jumps to another host when the previous one dies by firearm. Ruiz finds this out quite unpleasantly a few seconds after he shoots a goat on his property. Writer-director Demián Rugna is a horror specialist, though the only film of his that has played in U.S. theaters was last month’s Satanic Hispanics, which is the only one he didn’t write. If the specifics of how the rotten works remains fuzzy, Rugna knows how to generate horror and disgust with the best of them, as when the brothers transport Uriel’s body and we see the man’s pus, urine, and feces leaking through the bedsheets that they’re using to carry him.
We’ve seen other horror movies where otherwise gentle pet dogs suddenly turn vicious, but this one is the most savage of all, as the animal sinks its teeth into a little girl’s neck and thrashes it about. He can be brutal emotionally, too, as when Pedro receives a call from his recently murdered ex-wife (Virginia Garófalo) and she taunts him about his insecurities the way only a demon or a vindictive ex can. A sequence in a truck has Pedro and Jimmy’s mother (Paula Rubinsztein) ask her boys what’s happening without getting an answer, and the scene gains harrowing power from the toneless moaning of Pedro’s severely autistic teenage son (Emilio Vodanovich).
I do think the movie could have been clearer on how the rotten is manipulating Pedro by playing on his love for his children and his trouble controlling his anger — the guy hits a little girl with the door of his truck before getting out and punching her several times. (The girl may not be a human child, but even so…) The movie could use a throughline that connects the murders committed by the possessed to Pedro’s own impulsive and violent behavior. It could also do more with the casual racism shown by the white characters toward Uriel and his indigenous family.
Even so, there’s no questioning the convulsive power of Rugna’s images and his willingness to make horrible things happen that other horror movies don’t have the stomach for. In a genre full of hack filmmakers, he’s a distinctive talent, and When Evil Lurks is evidence of how far he’s willing to go.
When Evil Lurks
Starring Ezequiel Rodriguez and Demián Salomón. Written and directed by Demián Rugna. Rated R.
