When Evil Lurks (2023)
There's a version of When Evil Lurks that could have been one of the great modern horror films. The practical effects alone are worth acknowledging: grotesque, inventive, and crafted with a genuine commitment to physical horror that puts most studio genre fare to shame. The makeup work is startling in the best possible way. And the cast brings a raw, grounded desperation to their roles that sells the panic even when the material around them starts to wobble. All of that craft is right there on screen, visible and undeniable. So why did I leave so cold?
Director Demián Rugna drops us into a rural Argentine community under siege with almost no orientation. There's a mythology here, a set of supernatural rules governing how evil spreads, how it takes hold, what can stop it, but those rules are never clearly laid out and, more damningly, they're not consistently applied either. You find yourself trying to piece together the logic mid-scene, which is not the kind of puzzle-solving that makes horror engaging. It's the kind that pulls you out of the experience entirely. Some films earn that ambiguity through atmosphere or character work. This one mistakes murkiness for mystery, and the difference matters.
The comparisons that come to mind are films like The Wailing or The Sadness, genre pictures that pushed hard into extreme territory but gave you enough to hold onto, whether that was a grieving father's desperation or a gleefully committed satirical edge. When Evil Lurks reaches for that same register of escalating, boundary-testing horror without doing the groundwork those films did. The extremity starts to feel untethered. Shock without scaffolding.
Which brings me to the thing I can't avoid talking about: the film's treatment of children in some of its most graphic sequences. Horror has always used vulnerability to generate dread, and there's nothing inherently wrong with going to dark places if the story demands it. But these moments don't feel demanded by the story. They feel engineered for reaction. There's a difference between a film that makes you uncomfortable because it's telling you something true and one that makes you uncomfortable because discomfort was the entire point. When Evil Lurks too often falls into the second category, and it's the reason admiration and enjoyment stayed stubbornly separate for me throughout.
I want to be fair. If you're someone who prioritises visceral impact and technical execution above narrative cohesion, there genuinely is something here for you. The film commits to its set-pieces with an almost alarming conviction, and the body horror sequences have an inventiveness that deserves credit. This isn't lazy filmmaking. It's wilfully chaotic filmmaking, which is a different problem, but still a problem.
For my money, the best Latin American films I've seen recently find their power through strangeness that feels rooted and specific, that sense of a world with its own internal logic even when that world is deeply unsettling. I found that quality far more successfully in Monos, a film that's equally disorienting but earns every moment of its chaos through character and atmosphere. When Evil Lurks is reaching for something similar and comes up short.
Two and a half stars. There's enough craft on screen that I wouldn't dismiss it outright, and fans of extreme horror with a high tolerance for narrative looseness will likely rate it higher than I do. But for a film so concerned with the idea of contamination spreading uncontrollably, it's quietly ironic that the thing most likely to spread here is indifference. By the final act, I wasn't disturbed. I was just done.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2023 | Watched: 2026-05-30
Where to watch
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