‘When Evil Lurks’ Review – Demián Rugna Brings Another Delightfully Bleak Vision Of His World

Demián Rugna’s Terrified has been continually treating viewers with its unique vision of terror and continues to do so today with new viewers arriving at its haunted suburban landscape. His latest feature film When Evil Lurks takes Rugna’s relatively small scale approach and applies it to a larger world. By continuing to focus on small communities Rugna manages to keep the stakes and tension high while implicating just how far the ripples of consequence go.

The impressive thing about When Evil Lurks is how it approaches its world-building. Everything becomes revealed through necessity or the stubborn nature and actions of our main characters, brothers Pedro and Jimi Yazurlo (Ezekiel Rodriguez & Demián Salomón, respectively). Deep in the woods where the two brothers live, a gunshot rings in the distance which alerts them to investigate its meaning.

They find an eviscerated (read: bisected at the very least) body with scattered items on the ground, parts of a device they don’t recognize yet seem familiar to them somehow. The deceased was a cleaner, someone whose function was to visit a nearby residence stricken with a plague-like affliction to remedy the sickness before it spreads. The sickness is demonic possession, but no one really knows how it all started. All anyone knows is that the concept of churches and their attached faiths are dead, killed both by this reigning plague and the fear that what was once plentiful is not enough, the sense of community virtually converted into a weapon that now rots from the inside out.

After learning that the cleaner never got to do their job, the brothers trace his path to a nearby house and explain what happened, the woman of the house pleading for them to help her son Uriel. But once the two brothers take on this task, they have put everyone connected to them in much more danger than they have ever realized. There is a kind of evil in When Evil Lurks, an evil that passes from host to host much like a virus. But there are a set of rules that must always be followed to mitigate its spread.

Rugna’s explicatory tendencies don’t offer anything new to the horror genre, and the way the rules are modeled feels very much built on top of larger influences, like Romero’s Dead films and Craven’s Nightmare on Elm Street to narrow the focus down to a couple, with the bones of a Twilight Zone story thrown in for good measure. Yet When Evil Lurks never feels like a byproduct of better horror from other filmmakers that have come before; Rugna makes his own personal stamp known right away as the director of Terrified with both the dramatic command of his actors and how they exist in an understood, real space that exists alongside our own.

And it is the reality we buy into that jolts us from any expectation of formal process this very different world requires. Nothing is guaranteed, death is sudden at its best, and systematic distrust is something people have trouble adjusting to in lieu of evidence. As many reviewers have surely remarked, Rugna’s second entry is brutally violent and unapologetically so, but the images never linger. The film may move on quickly but these images burn into your brain more concretely because we’re whisked away prematurely from these violent images. That is, if we see them in plain view. Demián Rugna’s view of humanity is incredibly bleak here, and his insistence on brothers Pedro and Jimi being so strong-willed to a fault means either the damnation or salvation of countless people they have never met and will never meet.

Everything in Rugna’s efforts shines with repugnant brilliance like the near-iridescent ooze the possessed ones secrete. The visual language he built with Mariano Suárez for Terrified with its soft gel lighting and plain, yet hauntingly effective shot composition returns in more subtle ways. It’s not as front and center as it was in the 2017 film but it does much more heavy lifting with how it fills the space and details each character’s unspoken journey. While this is a big achievement for Rugna from a technical standpoint, his literary advancements on display prove that he can craft true immediate classics, and When Evil Lurks is a stepping stone on what feels like a short path towards mastery. It is considerably more merciless and unwavering than his previous films but earns every act of brutality displayed on screen.

In fact, When Evil Lurks feels like a spiritual successor in some ways to Terrified as it uses the idea of community to enhance the consequences, good and bad, of someone existing vaguely within each community attempting to exert control over it (in Terrified, literally policing) with an internal sense of morality calibrated to their actions as the true north. It’s a fascinating exploration Rugna has appointed to these two films while making each one feel like different sides of different coins, from different universes. What Rugna does with When Evil Lurks is worth the plunge into despair and gut-wrenching emotion as Rugna examines what makes the precious things in our lives weigh so much when they’re taken away.

When Evil Lurks is currently playing in select theaters courtesy of IFC Films. The film will debut on Shudder on October 27, 2023.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbJEiOOvBxc]