Cuando acecha la maldad
****/****
starring Ezequiel Rodríguez, Demián Salomón, Luis Ziembrowski, Federico Liss
written and directed by Demián Rugna
by Walter Chaw I felt like there was a hand pressing down on my chest during Demián Rugna’s When Evil Lurks, a horror film so vicious and uncompromising I wasn’t always sure I could finish it. I’ve seen it three times now, not because I’ve become desensitized to its lawlessness, but because it’s so well-constructed that I’m drawn back to it despite the anxiety it inspires. There’s comfort in the thrall of an artist who’s in complete control of his medium. When Evil Lurks is Rugna’s fifth film, and I don’t think it’s too soon to declare him an important filmmaker and a true innovator. I’ve never seen what he does in the horror genre before; I’d call it experimentation, except that it works on a more than theoretical level. Between this and his previous picture, Terrified (2017), he has deconstructed the familiar, reconstituting it into a beast that feels new and dangerous. When I take a shower now, it’s not Psycho or The Seventh Victim that comes to mind, it’s the long opening sequence of Terrified in which a man traces the source of a strange thumping in the middle of the night to something unspeakable happening to his wife in the bathroom for what must have been hours. There’s nothing new about locating terror in intensely personal private spaces, but there’s a revolution in having the idea to mate Martyrs with Poltergeist.
Pedro (Ezequiel Rodriguez) and Jimi (Demian Salomón) are brothers in a rural area of Argentina where one night, from inside their forest cabin, they hear gunshots. “Poachers?” Jimi asks. “That’s not a rifle, it’s a revolver,” says Pedro, the older and considerably more broken sibling. They wait for morning to go exploring, crossing miles of wilderness over animal trails, stepping over wire fences loosely defining parcels of undeveloped land. They come upon a scene of carnage, a body rent into chunks and pieces, plus clues that lead them to the house of a neighbour (Isabel Quinteros) who had hoped this man who is now just a pile of meat would murder her son, Uriel (Pablo Galarza now, Gonzalo Galarza later). The son’s in bad shape, see, bedridden and in a state of active decay. His mother says they thought they could treat whatever was wrong with him for a while until they realized he wasn’t sick: he was possessed. Is possessed. She calls him “the rotten”–in lowercase, because it wouldn’t be wise to say his name, and Pedro, in disgust, decides to kill him himself. It would be a mercy, not a murder, but if you do it incorrectly, “the rotten” gets out and starts to spread. Jimi talks Pedro out of it, but they can’t keep their mouths shut. They confide in another neighbour, Ruiz (Luis Ziembrowski), who’s noticed that things are off. His dogs have run away, for one, and now, with his wife Jimena (Desiree Salguiero) pregnant, well, somebody’s got to do something. “Kill me, Ruiz,” says the rotten. “Kill me before I move to Jimena’s belly.” It’s not offering a noble sacrifice–it’s goading a coward into action.
Other terrible decisions, other terrible things, and the rotten is set free. It takes over a goat, and when Ruiz compounds his sin, it takes over his wife, who finds herself holding an axe. And then it’s free again. Pedro and Jimi go to retrieve Pedro’s kids from his estranged wife, Sabrina (Virginia Garafolo): little Santino (Marcelo Michinaux) and the older, profoundly autistic Jair (Emilio Vodanovich). He wants them all to run, but Sabrina’s not going anywhere with Pedro. Rugna knows we’ll take Pedro’s side because we’ve seen what he’s seen–but then he reveals that Pedro, in his despair, tried to kill himself and his kids once already. (“I’m a coward. I can’t handle my life.”) It’s why he’s not allowed to see his family anymore; why he’s living with his single brother in a cabin in the woods. Pedro’s the one rotting from the inside, and now the rotten is spreading across the countryside towards the suburbs, the city, then who knows. As heroes go, Pedro is one by default and by dint of the terrible things he’s about to suffer because of the stupid things he can’t help but do. He is unexceptional but for the depth of his failure. He is the very model of the plight of the modern man: hapless, helpless, depressed, hopeless, and absolutely culpable by dint of his action or inaction for the end of the world. When Evil Lurks is about the pandemic, and the spread of fascism, and climate change, and Fundamentalist Evangelicalism in its many-tongued forms, and how it’s all both not our fault and thoroughly our fault. It doesn’t matter either way, because everyone dies alone, suffering and guilty.
Though I’ve seen and liked a lot of extreme horror, there aren’t many titles I’ve wanted to revisit, and there are even fewer with the compulsive rewatchability of a mainstream horror flick. Maybe the South Koreans preceded Rugna into this space with masterpieces like Kim Jee-woon’s James Bond/Hannibal Lecter amalgam I Saw the Devil, but the closest analogue I could figure for When Evil Lurks is Jaws. With about a third of it left to go, our hero brothers load up into a truck with Jimmy’s old flame Mirtha (Silvina Sabater) to confront the film’s great evil, which gave me precisely the same feeling of you-have-no-idea-what-you’re-getting-into dread as when Quint, Hooper, and Chief Brody head off onto open water in the Orca. It’s that good. It’s good enough that its impact is unblunted over multiple viewings. I’m stunned to witness the birth of this new thing that makes me feel like a child again, sitting before a movie that will probably upset me for the rest of my life. Something happens to a little girl in When Evil Lurks that is so awful, so invasive and such a betrayal, that I stood up the first time I saw it. The obvious thing would be to show the results of this awful thing in intimate, sticky detail, but Rugna is too sly for that. No, Rugna shows the little girl again instead, completely unmolested and whole, laughing and running, and the whole time, you know it’s not her anymore, and you’re the only one who does. The knowledge is fucking awful.
I also can’t shake a quieter scene as the brothers, with Pedro’s sons and their grandmother, Sara (Paula Rubinsztein), in tow, hit the road to find safe haven outside the rapidly expanding radius of the rotten’s influence. From the backseat, as Jair moans mechanically, Sara pulls her grandson Santino into her lap and tells him about the “seven rules” for surviving demonic possession in the sing-song way the elderly speak to children they love. Once started, she can’t be stopped, not even by her sons in the front seat screaming at her to be still. The problem, see, is rule #5, which warns never to name the rotten by its true name: she proceeds to list all the demon names she knows. “You’re saying them!” cries Santino. Sara, full of love for this bright little boy, laughs and says, “Oh my, I am!” But it’s not adorable for us, just as it’s not adorable when the elderly launch into fugues they can’t knock themselves out of. Age is a needle stuck in a groove. It happens to the best of us if we live long enough and are surrounded by people who love us enough to hide how much we irritate them. Rugna making us want to shut sweet, protective Sara up is diabolical.
While I knew better than to hope, what’s truly infernal about Rugna is how he frames things so that we expect positive, even heartwarming, outcomes. (In some tellings of the Pandora’s Box story, the only thing that was ever in the box was hope.) I was moved by his portrayal of Jair and his family’s obvious love for him. It’s never in question, Jair is never reduced to anchor or monster–his needs are seen to, and he’s treated as a human being. It shouldn’t feel this uncommon, but it does: Horror movies hate the disabled community–the culturally encoded rejection of difference exploited in the easy equation of unconventional with bad. Unable to coax Jair into Mithra’s home to sleep, Pedro settles down to bunk with his boy in the backseat of their car. Then his uncle Jimi comes and offers to stay, too, but Pedro shoos him off–but not before saying “I love you, brother.” Jimi is concerned, I think, that Pedro will successfully kill himself one day, and that’s how you deal with someone who is not long for the world, who is marked with annihilation: You look at them with love, you touch their shoulder while you can, and you hope that makes a difference. And then Rugna betrays their love by revealing the possibility that Jair, because of his wiring, might serve as a kind of biological demon trap.
When Evil Lurks makes us complicit with the rotten because we are already experts in miserable, ungraceful thoughts that are beneath us, that disgrace us (shut the old bag up, kill the kid, forget the wife, burn the town). But then it shows us these shattered people who hold to each other in the maelstrom, offering us a little hope before ripping it away again in unimaginably awful ways. The film is in a sense a documentary. because the world has infested us and we’re all of us rotting from the inside. The final showdown between our heroes and the rotten happens in an abandoned schoolhouse. Not abandoned, I guess–decrepit? It’s night, and it’s freezing, and the classrooms are filled with silent children, pale in the moonlight and stock-still at their desks. “Don’t listen to them,” Mithra warns. “They lie.” But even as they lie, I found myself believing them: they look so scared, so earnest. By this time in When Evil Lurks, I wanted there to be a familiar trope, just one part I could run ahead of so it would seem less terrifying.
Rugna decides he’ll pull off his last trick on a literal stage in a black auditorium, Pedro made to be the spectator of a show for which he is in every way that matters the author. Pedro is the end of the world because he is ordinary and pathetic. He is not without courage, though he is utterly without heroism. He does things he’s afraid of doing but feels sorry for himself as he’s doing them. He has everything, and he wants to give it away. He’s pugnacious, but he doesn’t want to fight. He knows the answer but doesn’t want to do the work. He is us–not how we are all of the time, perhaps, but enough of the time. When everything becomes clear too late, Pedro is left to despair over the choices he’s made. “That’s how it gets you,” Mithra says. “If you’re afraid it will get your children, it will come to get your children.” The seventh rule is not to be afraid of anything. I doubt that’s possible; I’m afraid all the time now. When Evil Lurks is full of images I will never shake because they’ve been delivered via the cinematic equivalent of a hypodermic needle. Demián Rugna is the truth. All hail.
