When Evil Lurks

In some respects When Evil Lurks, the latest film from writer-director Demián Rugna, makes the case for opening legends. Those clumsy information dumps placed upfront, before the credits have cooled, in which the audience is spoon-fed just enough unmolested data to make sense of the skewed normal we're soon to experience. If nothing else these solemn stanza do unburden the characters inhabiting the piece from having to regularly regurgitate unnaturally precise sentences that are, very obviously, directed out through the fourth wall at the audience, rather than anyone actually sharing the frame with the speaker. Perhaps the briefings in When Evil Lurks stand out more because the rest of the film is so purely dedicated to orchestrating mayhem? Doubly puzzling when this creeping disorder is founded upon a genuinely unfathomable rule-set, designed by devils. We see glimpses of broken exorcism devices throughout When Evil Lurks. They look like heavily embellished sextants - brass curvature and telescopic apparatus accessorised with thin, stiletto blades - but there's almost zero sense of how they will actually be used to banish the squatting spectres. That's not important here. Although the possessions themselves are primarily deployed as violent accelerants in frayed, human relationships, the real meat in When Evil Lurks is the film's ever-growing sense of despondency. Ezequiel Rodriguez's Pedro, the shattered man at the centre of the piece, is consistently placed in hopelessly complicated situations that demand a nuanced response that this poor unfortunate is completely incapable of delivering.