The Best Movies of the Year: The Inescapable, Apocalyptic Contagion of When Evil Lurks

In Demián Rugna’s When Evil Lurks, God is assuredly dead. The progenitor of all beneficence in the universe is not dead in a metaphorical sense, but an all too literal one: The viewer is dropped into 2023’s most committedly disturbing horror film completely cold, realizing in dribs and drabs just how thoroughly humanity has apparently been abandoned by the divine. Rugna’s world feels like one that has grown up in the aftermath of some titanic, pivotal battle for mankind’s soul … a valorous and hard-fought crusade that we simply lost in the end. The creator has become a casualty, and this place has been overrun, not just by infernal corruption but an inescapable sense of loss. Entropy has set in, and the world is just going through the motions at this point, keeping the day-to-day fabric of life together with a fraying quilt of improvised patchwork maintenance. Perhaps the broken pieces can be held together for a while, but sooner or later, the collapse must come.

Or at least, that’s more or less what we can infer. The beauty of Rugna’s atmospheric horror gem is the precisely calculated distance it keeps between its acts of chilling corruption and brutality, and the audience’s understanding of the world and its consequences. The writer-director beautifully implies and hints at the depths of depravity that make up the firmament of this nightmare, but refuses to hold our hands with concrete literalism. Can our characters’ strict adherence to a set of rules avert any of the carnage? It’s impossible for us to say, given our total lack of comprehension of which minor infractions actually matter in the grand scheme of things. We are, after all, talking about matters of life, death and the corruption of the very soul — how can we hope to grasp the subtleties of our own metaphysical destruction? This shit is beyond us.

When Evil Lurks is a “possession horror” movie. That is absolutely a fair assessment of whether it belongs in what has been one of the most prolific and creatively bankrupt subgenres of the broader horror world in recent years. But it carries itself in a manner totally opposed to so many of the one-word titles (Nefarious, Incarnate, Demonic, etc.) that continuously spawn updated versions of themselves in the straight-to-VOD cesspit, concerned not with firing off as many Exorcist clichés as possible within a 99-minute runtime but instead prioritizing the evocation of a uniquely nightmarish world, one so strange that it’s almost without comparison. And Rugna gives us precisely as many breadcrumbs as we need in order to semi-blindly stumble our way down that horrific path, no more and no less.

To start with, the mere fact that possession exists at all is typically not something one will find characters immediately acknowledging within the context of a horror movie. A more conventional Hollywood story of this nature typically involves a victim’s slow decline into spiritual/physical corruption while a bevy of onlookers fight tooth and nail against the acknowledgement of a spiritual source: Anyone who invokes “demonic possession” is shouted down as superstitious and unhelpful. But in the setting of When Evil Lurks, the idea of possession isn’t just plausible, but seemingly widely understood, at least on some level, by everyone present. For generations, it seems, these people have been growing up in a world where this is simply something that happens on occasion. Those who hear of the situation treat it not as an exceptional judgment from above (or below), but more like how one might be expected to react to news of the outbreak of a deadly virus in your school district. And that characterization ultimately isn’t far off at all. This is corruption that spreads easily, and invisibly, by vectors that are both physical and spiritual.

The alacrity of this evil is a constant source of tension and dread in When Evil Lurks, because we understand only in the most vague sense how the actions of brothers Pedro and Jaime are tied to spreading the demonic contagion, even as they attempt to fight to contain it and then flee from it. The bits of gore and bodily fluids on Pedro’s jacket — will they physically spread the possession to anyone who touches them, or even comes near? Can this same brand of evil infect animals just as easily as it can humans? If there are rigid physical procedures needed to purify or destroy the evil, just who has any hope of successfully performing them?

When Evil Lurks is packed with these frenzied queries, but intentionally almost entirely bereft of answers. The characters don’t know; neither do we. Instead, we come to understand in our own way that they’re operating on a hodgepodge of both pseudo-science and folklore tied into popular culture, well-intentioned maxims meant to keep them safe. Any piece of information must be treated as both potential gospel, or simple superstition. Does the use of electric lights actually draw demonic forces to it? We’re never given concrete evidence one way or the other, but we do get to see the suspenseful fallout of a character attempting to drive down a country road while using his headlights as sparingly as possible for this reason. In this way, every scene becomes a battle between “best practices” and practicality, except it’s your immortal soul on the line.

And rest assured, there is no help coming. The film begins with a murder off camera, quickly discovered by Pedro and Jaime to be a “cleaner” — a professional spiritual exterminator, seemingly from outside the church system, sent from some bureaucratic central office to snuff out the demonic incursion in this rural region, preferably before things get out of hand. We’re told that with this man’s death, there won’t be another cleaner dispatched for weeks, months, even years. The system is just too backed up, too overtaxed, to get another technical expert on these matters to the scene in time to be of any help. Of course this begs the question of just how widespread these issues have become — is the whole of society teetering on the brink? Or has the central government become so corrupt and filled with a more mundane, earthly evil that they simply don’t care how many rural towns end up becoming breeding grounds for the citizens of hell? For that matter, what is happening everywhere else on Earth? Just how close are we to total spiritual obliteration? When Evil Lurks invites your frenzied imagination to speculate on the worst case scenarios, even as it tracks the much more personal, intimate destruction of Pedro’s immediate reality in particular.

Nor does Rugna flinch when it comes to directly depicting that destruction. When Evil Lurks is harrowing in not just the violence gorily captured on screen — and it can be revoltingly brutal — but its daring in which characters it chooses to inflict those woes upon. No one is safe, and no one is free from the potential of becoming the tool of even more heinous acts of degradation and spiritual decay. Rugna captures all of it, never pulling away from moments that most directors would choose to simply evoke rather than starkly depict. When you expect him to be satisfied, that’s when the film plunges into the effluvia that much deeper.

This uncommon blend of patience and introspection, counterbalanced by flashes of outright, uncompromising brutality was likewise present in Rugna’s well-regarded 2017 feature Terrified (Aterrados), but with When Evil Lurks the director has ascended to a new level of international buzz that should see his work discovered by a far wider audience of global horror geeks. These fans, ever eager to discover artists probing the boundaries of what will make us squirm, will be rewarded with a bleak vision of the apocalypse in slow motion, a wrenchingly real world suffused with an evil that has become disgustingly pedestrian.

Jim Vorel is Paste’s resident genre movie guru. You can follow him on Twitter for much more film content.