Argentine film without any concessions, When Evil Lurks for the first time in Europe FEFFS. As two brothers discover a dead body cut in half, the city is about to sink under the Devil's grip. Believes whoever believes he will triumph over the evil one... much more than a raw film, When evil Lurks renews the codes of the genre in depth by taking note of the state of our time, its dreams and its bankruptcies. And as a bonus, we talk about God's death and exorcism with his director: Demián Rugna In person!
Interview with Demián Rugna
You will not kill
The films of possession and assimilated, no doubt you've seen a lot of them since Exorcist Of the late Friedkin. It must be said that if the master of cinema had been able to mark an entire generation, he had also gone beyond the mere stage of generational trauma by succeeding in generating his own codes. Until then, it was difficult to separate a film about the Devil from religion and its folklore. The possessed was to systematically spit in the face of his interlocutors and vomit a torrent of blasphemous insults that no longer have the same effect fifty years later, except to a condemned public and that will never evolve. Some will notice that apostate films no longer have this transgressive essence today. Our society is no longer the same. « Churches are already dead » as the breath so well When Evil Lurks From the beginning... until the last seconds. The evil precedes the man who carries it in him. He rots the earth, gangrenes the beings and feeds on the fear of the other.
« Kill man to prevent the beast from being born. »
Unlike the Christian inheritance declined until exhaustion, if not the caricature of the system of beliefs against indulgences, When Evil Lurks takes a minimalist approach without all this useless and laughable verbiage. Sorry for poor Father Gabriel Amorth, camped by Russel Crow in the last film of the franchise success, but you have to know how to change the formula. Otherwise more vicious than a warlike demon, the Devil is like a disease: transmissible, like a plague that takes shape in ordinary people. It is assumed that the impact of the pandemic was able to produce its replicas during the project's inception. Killing the possessed means becoming the possessed and condemning oneself. Yet a simple rule is more pernicious than it seems when evil spreads everywhere and owes us nothing. It is also to take the decalogue and its fifth command on reverse. Our ordinary hero is quickly naked and alone. Any ploy for opposing any resistance encounters the failure wall. The attempt is immediately stillborn.
It all begins with this abomination, a morbid obese reduced to an informed thing where one no longer distinguishes pus from fat. Like a cursed relic, his family preserves it, conscious that eliminating it is to free the plague. It's the zero patient one might say. An aberration before it becomes ordinary. It is the sensation of horror, of visceral repugnance that gives nausea to simple sight. A furuncle that one would like to pierce but whose incandescent magma it contains is feared. An infection that will contaminate society. No exceptions for demon victims. Evil empests and even flies are seen landing on its targets.
The banality of evil
In the sensation it gives, the film by Demián Rugna recalls the effect that the intro punched the 28 weeks later compared to all previously produced zombie movies. By widening the angle, the Argentine director gives us a new horrific perspective that does good in a genre that too tends to look in the ice. Unbeatable, the demon plays with our perception and the rules that we thought to read. It's all our reason that is overturned and the very grammar of hope that collapses. And with it, the beliefs of those who still have the luxury (or stupidity) to have it.
« Las iglesias están muertas. »
Worn by particularly well-crafted scenes, When Evil Lurks plays a balanced score between CGIs and striking organic special effects. We know the scale of exponential violence and no doubt our world demonstrates it to us every day. However, a particular sequence (and which will not be revealed further) may remain forever in your unconscious when you cross molasses. Yet we do not fall into gratuitousness or adulescent slasher. When Evil Lurks troubles more than it scares. To the omnipotence of religion, Demián Rugna prefers all evil.
The film cultivates its own style where violence becomes pervasive until it asks the question of our relationship with it. Like his characters, the spectator seeks to understand the logic that animates this scourge and clings to the slightest sign; A second screening at the Gérardmer festival confirms exemplary consistency. in the spread of Evil where every sound or visual detail counts. Rather than tight shots, the Argentine director opts for a scope format in perfect match with a diffuse horror. When evil approaches, shadows panic, nature becomes deaf. Literally. We can finally read a horrific variation of the myth of Abel and Cain that condemns by murder to wandering. Does the monster that broods in us really need the Devil to express itself? It is the violence of the neighbour, the landowner, the administration, the family. The violence of life. Friedkin gave us a clear answer when he was still in this world:
« The films I make are kind of reflections of violence in our society. The unexpected daily violence that everyone is forced to suffer. »
Our criticism of When Evil Lurks
Trailer
You want to! Thank you. 😉
Excellent movie! A slap!
While the churches have long died, this demonic possession which spreads like an infectious disease celebrates the advent of the « end of the world » by doing a large carnage on a growing scale. Traumatic and up to the endist (she saves no one), this horrific work, which is deceitful with falcian macabre hints and inevitable fatality, plays on an unpredictable fear... At a thousand places therefore facilities resurrected from a genre rhymed since the Exorcist. When evil is born, nature dies!