Demián Rugna’s When Evil Lurks is the splatterhouse possession nightmare by which all others will be judged

When Evil Lurks. // Courtesy IFC Films

October has only just begun, but we might already be in a position to crown a title for best horror film of the year. While plenty of stuff on the horizon looks exciting as heck, only one film so far in 2023 has taken us directly to Hell—and that’s When Evil Lurks.

Demián Rugna made his first mark with mainstream U.S. audiences when we got a look at Terrified, which showed a director/writer capable of mastering every type of scare from jump to implied to spiritual to goo all in one film. The Argentine master of the form returns to his extensive wheelhouse in this, his fifth feature.

When Evil Lurks takes place in an agricultural community way, way off the grid in Argentina. In this remote village, brothers Pedro (Ezequiel Rodríguez) and Jimmy (Demián Salomón) discover that a nearby farmhouse has fallen victim to a “rotten”—a form of demonic possession where the human begins to rot physically and spiritually into a moaning, puss-filled blob. While the rotten himself welcomes death, no one seems capable of dispatching him, and the barnyard animals are all acting really goddamned weird. The mayor enlists the brothers to help re-locate the rotten to a place far, far away in hopes of saving his land his soul. What starts as a good old-fashioned Satanic buddy roadtrip goes predictably awry, and things get real chopped-to-bits from there. 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 everyone it is exposed to, and enlist the aid of a wizened “cleaner,” who holds the only tools that can stop this supernatural plague.

The thing about When Evil Lurks is that, from the minutiae to overwhelming, it lets the audience know that they are out of their depth. Minus the presence of a cell phone, it is almost impossible to nail down what decade this is taking place in, and that fits perfectly with how timeless/ageless the entire endeavor feels. This is ancient, unstoppable, and all the players on screen are merely footnotes in a larger story.

When Evil Lurks. // Courtesy IFC Films

In what feels truly exceptional, this world is overly familiar with the rules of demonic behavior. There isn’t time wasted on debating whether or not evil is real, instead characters immediately leap to looking for solution to preserve their crops or animals in the face of the economic harm of Satanic blight. While the story starts with folks barreling ahead into plans and systems, it actually becomes more confusing for the audience by the time the rules are actually explained. The point is that the audience remains an outsider while those in it know all-too-well how truly fucked they are.

When Evil Lurks is a gleefully cruel film. Nothing is off-limits and no one is safe, but each brutal end arrives either at the end of a wink that projects itself a full act early or comes as a blindside out of the ether. When all is said and done, nothing is salvaged and nothing is really done, either. It’s a film as brutal as it is grounded, and timeless as it is somehow thoroughly modern in its viral despair. It takes something truly magic to make make an audience holler with laughter while wishing they could unsee everything that just happened, in such finely measured dosages. Demián Rugna is an angel of death and When Evil Lurks is cinema dripping with delightful poison.

The film hits theaters in the U.S. on October 6, and will available on streaming via Shudder on October 27, 2023.