Through cinema, one can learn about the funniest little quirks of other cultures. It isn’t the big differences between people that fascinate me. Instead, it’s all the little things—the kind of things people don’t even think is odd.
Apparently, apple ice cream is a big thing in Argentina. That’s a flavor I’ve not heard of before, but 2023’s When Evil Lurks presents it as a popular thing there.
Another thing the international cinema of today demonstrates is how the playing field for making films has been leveled by the increased affordability of professional-level filmmaking technology. This quality of the photography, and the production overall, makes this indistinguishable from the output of the better funded of the independent studios of the US.
The story unfolds in an interesting way, with two brothers (Ezequiel Rodríguez, Demián Salomón) on an isolated farm hearing gunshots in the night. The next morning, walk to the farm of their nearest neighbor, finding a dismembered corpse along the way. The slaughtered man had been carrying a suitcase containing an assortment of very odd, very old looking instruments. I was trying to imagine what it would look like if assembled, as the first image that came to my mind was an astrolabe. Turns out the device will be more complex than that but, alas, we will be denied the opportunity to see it in action.
The trail continues, with the brothers eventually learning of a “rotten” being concealed on yet another farm. It is a bit unclear what a rotten is exactly, and my first thought was this is a zombie. The grotesque, swollen, oozing man they encounter is, indeed, said to be deceased, though he is capable of speech. In fact, he begs the men to kill him. It will be in their best interest to not do that.
Instead, this is something closer to possession. Turns out killing a rotten will only release the demon and put it in the body of somebody else, more often than not that of the person who committed the murder. Then that newly possessed person gets killed, and somebody kills them, only to be possessed, and so on.
I am still a bit unclear as to the rules of this world. Curiously, the demon sometimes takes a non-human host. I was not surprised in any way that the first animal we see taken is a goat. One thing I know didn’t happen is the goat didn’t kill anybody. And I wasn’t sure how a character identifies the goat as evil, as it didn’t suddenly have such abilities as speech, so that it can ask her if she likes the taste of butter (My apologies to those who have yet to see The Witch. Go see and come back to read the rest of this later. I’ll still be here).
Another aspect of the chain of possession that had me confused is it initially seemed to flow at first directly from one person (or animal) to another, but then it eventually spreads to multiple subjects simultaneously without any obvious trigger. One of the possible victims is Rodríguez’s deeply autistic son, who is impaired to an extent that makes it difficult to determine whether he has succumbed. That son’s favorite treat is the aforementioned apple ice cream. Just thought you’d like to know how that works into the plot.
Yet another curious aspect of the world of this movie is how readily the characters accept what is happening. The brother’s mom even sings an allegedly famous ditty that conveys the rules of how to deal with a rotten because, of course, a horror movie like this has rules to be followed. Perhaps the most confusing to me of those is one shouldn’t have electric lights as the presence of a rotten distorts the shadows cast by them. Well, that’s the best I could determine, as we never really see this rule impact the plot in any significant way.
Naturally, the most important element of any horror film is whether it is scary, and I can confirm this one is, in both jump scares and lingering creepiness. There were a couple of moments I anticipating, which diminished the impacts of those turns. Most of the time, however, I found myself intrigued and wondering where it was headed.
A climatic battle towards the ends takes place in a classroom in the middle of the night, with children quietly and calmly sitting at their desks. Them sitting in complete darkness didn’t creep me out as much as their being perfectly well-behaved, which everybody knows is when children are at their most evil. That, and as somebody whose entire college education was while holding down a full-time day job can testify, night school is evil.
One of the most effective ways When Evil Lurks messes with our heads is it doesn’t pull some punches when I expected it to, then it seemingly undoes the appalling thing that just happened, only to follow that up with a bigger punch. All this talk about punches is appropriate, as this is a film which left me feeling a bit beaten up. And yet I suspect I will be returning for a second beatdown at a later date.
In the meantime, could somebody tell me where I could score some goddamn apple ice cream?
Dir: Demián Rugna
Starring Ezequiel Rodríguez, Demián Salomón
Watched on Shudder