When Evil Lurks (2023) aka Cuando acecha la maldad (1080p BluRay x265 HEVC 10bit AAC 5.1) Demian Rugna Ezequiel Rodriguez Demian Salomon Silvina Sabater Virginia Garofalo Emilio Vodanovich Marcelo Michinaux Lucrecia Niron folk body gore supernatural

When Evil Lurks (2023) aka Cuando acecha la maldad, directed by Demián Rugna, encoded in 10 bit HEVC with AAC sound, including original theatrical 5.1 and English subtitles.

IMDb : https://www.imdb.com/title/tt16300962/

Video encoded in two-pass 11.0 Mbps x265 10bit with the veryslow preset for archive quality image. Audio encoded separately with Apple AAC for the highest-quality AAC sound available. Subtitles converted to SRT and heavily corrected.

Note : You may ask why you should get this encode instead of any other, and the answer, apart from the higher quality, is that I've fixed the fucking subtitles. The original ones were done by someone who's clearly not a native English speaker, and were incredibly bad, to the point of incomprehensibility, and it bugged me so much I just had to fix them.

I first saw this little Argentine film a while back, and it's stuck with me, because it does a few things so, so well. First of all, it's beautifully shot and in a lovely country setting, but with some pretty fucking horrible shit going on, just brutal, so it makes for a nice contrast. It's also well acted and has an engaging, tense story. But what's really special is that it does something few other films manage, it builds its own coherent world, and just drops you in it to let you figure out what's going on, and it's really, really well done. If you read about it, you might see some stuff about metaphors for Latin American government dysfunction and whatnot, and yes, there's some of that, but mostly, it's a story about a slow motion supernatural apocalypse, a world where a demonic evil takes root and spreads like a cross between a disease and a lethal chemical spill, contaminating people, animals, and the very earth itself. There are precautions you can take, but if you slip up just once, you're liable to be exposed to a force so overwhelmingly vicious and unrelenting, and that knows all your weaknesses and will not doubt a second, that it's mostly hopeless. The "lurks" in the title is more properly translated as "stalks", and that's what this film does, it keeps you on your toes. The worldbuilding is slightly less mysterious and successful when the rules start to get spelled out in the second act, but the third act is such an all-time fucked-up downer ending that it more than makes up for it. Cast is mostly unknowns, but Ezequiel Rodríguez, Demián Salomón, and Silvina Sabater all give very strong, understated performances. There are also some incredibly brutal kills. A must see.

When brothers Pedro and Jimi hear gunshots out in the fields at night, they hesitate to investigate, but set out in the morning and find a grotesquely mangled body and mysterious broken equipment. The man was seemingly headed to the house of neighbour María Elena, and when they get there, they discover her son Uriel has become "rotten", a bloated, pestilent host to a demon who will be physically born from his body when he dies. The dead man was a government "Cleaner" sent to dispose of Uriel without releasing the demon, and now that that's off the table, the brothers, along with suspicious local landowner Ruiz, have to take matters into their own hands before Uriel succumbs and the demon is born and taints the entire area, and the local cops are worse than useless. They improvise a plan to move Uriel hundreds of miles in Ruiz' truck, and although he falls out when they have a near accident, they estimate it's far enough. However, one of Ruiz' animals begins acting strangely, leading to tragedy for him and his pregnant wife, and the two brothers set out in their truck, planning to leave everything behind, pick up Pedro's two kids from his estranged wife in town, and get the hell out, but every tiny contact with the evil spreads the contagion, and they're soon on the run with the kids and their grandmother, desperately seeking help from an old friend of Jimi who used to be one of the original Cleaners when the infections started in the cities.

As with most modern films, this transfer is perfect both in image and sound, and now that I've fixed the fucking subtitles, there's nothing to complain about except maybe that it would have been interesting to have a commentary track.

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