By David Dent
Don’t expect director Demián Rugna to give you any easy answers in this very strange, and occasionally incredibly disturbing Argentinian fright flick.
Brothers Pedro (Ezequiel Rodriguez) and Jimmy (Demian Salomon) are concerned. In a farmhouse on the edge of their village a large, decaying man called Uriel – alive but with all the hallmarks of a bloated corpse – lies on a bed; they refer to him as ‘a rotten’. Precisely what this means is never really explained, but the infected man can only be despatched by a specialist – called a cleaner – provided by the Ministry.
The only problem is that the cleaner appointed lies in bloody pieces, attacked en route to his task; so it’s left for non qualifieds Pedro and Jimmy to load the body onto a truck and drive it hundreds of kilometres away from civilisation. But they manage to lose the body on the way, which spells trouble for the brothers and the local community; the ‘rotten’ is highly contagious and this disease spread has all the hallmarks of zombie cannibalism.
Pedro visits his estranged wife and child, with a view to abducting his offspring and getting as far away as possible as quickly as possible. But that plan fails, and Pedro and Jimmy find themselves enmeshed in an increasingly deadly situation.
Honestly it’s kind of difficult to get a handle on the nature of the threat in When Evil Lurks; all the audience knows is that it’s a sly and very bloody one. Therefore there’s no neat cause/effect narrative, and the advice provided to stave off a ‘rotten’ infestation by one of the cast – something about no light, no shooting, not calling it by its name – is intriguing but baffling.
But the effectiveness of the movie lies, and is saved by, its horrid details: a dog savaging a little girl, who appears unharmed in the next scene; a mother chewing on the brains of her offspring, strobed in a car’s headlights; and a wife killing her husband, and then herself – with an axe – to stop the spread of infection. When Evil Lurks may not equal the sum of its parts, but some of those parts are incredibly effective.
When Evil Lurks heads to UK cinemas from 6 October 2023.
Bloody Flicks 