When Evil Lurks

Directed by Demián Rugna, When Evil Lurks follows two brothers (Ezequiel Rodríguez’s Pedro and Demián Salomón’s Jimi) as they find themselves pursued by an malevolent force after discovering a body in the woods. It’s workable subject matter that’s employed to progressively uninvolving and underwhelming effect by Rugna, as the filmmaker, armed with his own screenplay, delivers a sluggish, often impenetrable narrative that contains few, if any, attributes designed to capture and sustain the viewer’s interest – with the arms-length atmosphere perpetuated by paper-thin characters and a half-baked, context-free narrative. There’s little doubt, ultimately, that the latter winds up cementing When Evil Lurks‘ place as a thoroughly objectionable and interminable misfire, as the picture, for the most part, makes exceedingly little sense (eg why are people having children in this apocalyptic landscape?) and often contradicts itself in terms of how the evil force works (eg it jumps from body to body lightning fast in one scene, but then lingers for days in another). And although the movie admittedly does boast a handful of tense, appreciatively gruesome set-pieces, including (and especially) a digression involving a little girl and her dog, When Evil Lurks builds towards an absolutely endless third act that couldn’t possibly be less satisfying (or more anticlimactic) – with the end result a woefully inept disaster that might’ve worked as a short (but probably not).

* out of ****