When Evil Lurks (2023) Review!!

Synopsis – In a remote village, two brothers find a demon-infected man just about to give birth to evil itself. They decide to get rid of the man but merely succeed in helping him to deliver the inferno.

My Take – Possession films are back in business! Indeed, the commercial success of the excellent ‘Evil Dead Rise’, the entertaining ‘The Pope’s Exorcist’ and the underwhelming ‘The Exorcist: Believer’ have pretty much guaranteed that over the next few years the screens are going to be bombarded with new stories about the ultimate battle between good and evil.

But however, when it comes to comparing which one actually reinvigorated the long-stale division of horror genre this year, hands down Argentinian filmmaker Demián Rugna (Terrified) gets to walk away with all the glories, as his positively wicked latest is an absolutely brutal roller coaster of terror that grips you from the first frame and just doesn’t let go.

Standing out particularly due to its massively intriguing story-line that offers a different twist on the whole possession idea. Rather than deal with a singular individual taking on the role of the possessed and unfold terrors throughout the course of the film, the concept here includes a town being able to get possessed and carry out the violence like a virus, bringing out its own set of rules on how to deal with the situation, and the very specific way of expelling them.

But most importantly, while even the most shocking one of the lot have at least some parameters to them, here, writer-director Rugna throws all guard rails entirely to the wayside, where nobody is safe including animals and children.

Defiantly crossing several lines which even the most twisted of films in the genre wouldn’t dare to step over, coursing with a helpless, hopeless feeling, the feature has all the makings of a new high-mark for horror as it defiantly brings to life a vision of pure evil unlike any other seen before.

The story follows brothers Pedro (Ezequiel Rodriguez) and Jimmy (Demián Salomon), who upon hearing gunshots in the woods next to their the Argentinan countryside home, begin their round to investigate, only to stumble upon a torso of an unknown man and some unique tools left behind.

Though they initially suspect it to be a puma attack, however, upon visiting the house of an elderly woman named Maria Elena (Isabel Quinteros), they find the answer in the form of her oldest son Uriel who has become one of the rotten. A bedridden, bloated, and marked being possessed by an unborn demon who is awaiting physical birth. But even as he begs to kill him, they can’t in the conventional sense because the demon will then spread throughout the town like a virus.

Though Pedro and Jimmy go to the police to urge them the seriousness of the situation, upon finding no help, they team up with Ruiz (Luis Ziembrowski), a local whose only concern is that the rotten is on the land he has acquired, to get Uriel outside city limits and drop him off. However, this action leads off to a bunch of chain reactions that they simply may not be able to outrun.

What follows is anything but predictable. With the film’s pulse being intense and relentless, every frame seems meticulously designed to suffocate the audience with a palpable sense of unease. Here, director Rugna brings plenty of innovations to the genre, starting with the idea that where evil has become so common in the world that it’s become routine.

Everyone in the film’s rural Argentinian farming community and the nearby modern town already knows the seven rules for dealing with possessing spirits. Everyone knows how implacable and powerful they are, too. The film even explores the dangers of when people start to think bad things can only happen to other people, shared community and belief are lost, and the institutions put in place to protect us become complacent and disinterested.

While so many possession stories operating in the shadow of The Exorcist (1973) are primarily religious stories, this one is more of a family story, about the farmer’s ex-wife, children, and mother, and his attempts to protect them as the contagion spreads, fouling everything it touches. Pedro, no matter what, seeks to protect his family unit. His wife has a restraining order against him for his erratic behavior, but he still attempts to rescue everyone from the encroaching shadow that looms.

And under the grit and grain of Mariano Suárez’s cinematography, each image more so than the last seems to be built to ratchet up the inescapable doom. A possessed goat pressing a shotgun to its own head to release what’s inside of it, a catatonic boy suddenly gaining the ability to move for unknown purposes, the host of evil itself, or one of the many acts of self-mutilation the film involves makes the blood run cold.

The standout of this film aside from the superb acting, which includes the likes of Ezequiel Rodriguez, Demián Salomon, Luis Ziembrowski, Silvia Sabater, Marcelo Michinaux and Isabel Quinteros, is its delivery of an array of incredible and relentless sequences that are both shocking and brutal. That scene with the dog was absolutely monstrous, and I shook my head in disbelief that anyone would have the gonads to show something that intense in a film. The film rarely lets up, and you will be treated to jaw drop after jaw drop.

Director Rugna never needs to rely on cheap shocks or jump scares when he has so many ways of evoking real dread. But at heart, this film is meant for horror fans who thought they’d seen it all and were done being scared by possession thrillers. With this project, he breaks plenty of horror rules and literally writes his own, turning his film into 2023’s most unnerving horror release. On the whole, ‘When Evil Lurks’ is the year’s best possession flick that is throughout original and delightfully brutal.