Critic Reviews

When Evil Lurks is a capital “H” horror film that risks it all and hits the jackpot, pummeling its audience into submissions and still leaving us asking for more.

With this project, Rugna breaks plenty of horror rules and literally writes his own, turning his film into 2023’s most unnerving horror release — and a welcome revival for a subgenre that seemed like it was on its last spindly, clawed, wall-climbing legs.

Perhaps it’s the fact that the first 45 minutes of “When Evil Lurks” is so great, but the dopamine rush does fade quite a bit in the second half of the film.

This is a movie that is both familiar and fresh. Scary, yes, but mostly disturbing, gory, smart, quite expansive, and all around created in the bowels of hell itself. 

Delivering scares at a pace that rarely allows one to catch their breath, and with enough gruesome surprises to consistently startle.

This is a film that delights in unspoken terrors and audience misdirection.

Demián Rugna's debut feature, Terrified contains one of the most eerily disturbing scenes in recent cinema history, a moment involving an unwanted guest at a dinner table. His follow-up, When Evil Lurks, confirms that the Argentinian filmmaker knows exactly how to get under your skin.

Even when you then think it may have all settled down, the film twists the knife even further.

Demián Rugna’s harrowing film spares no one from the cruelty of its world.

This is a dark and timely parable about what happens when trust — among community members, within families, between a government and its people — disintegrates.