99 min | NR | October 6, 2023 | IFC Films
A demon gestates inside a man’s body in rural Argentina, and there are rules for destroying it before it gets loose. Pedro breaks every one of them. What follows is a contagion that spreads through panic and refuses to grant anyone mercy.
Pedro lives in rural Argentina with his family when he and his brother Jimi discover that a neighbor is incubating a demon. The locals call it a rotten. It is a body swollen with evil that must be destroyed by precise rules before it births something worse. Pedro panics and breaks every rule. Demián Rugna builds the film around a single argument. Evil spreads because frightened people make the wrong choice and then keep making it.
Ezequiel Rodríguez plays Pedro as a man whose every instinct is poison. He runs when he should stay and acts when he should wait. Rodríguez never softens him into a hero. Demián Salomón plays Jimi as the brother who knows slightly more and understands nothing useful. The two share a panic that reads as real because neither actor reaches for composure. Silvina Sabater appears as Mirtha, the old woman who knows the rules, and her calm certainty makes the men around her look like children.
Rugna writes and directs with a refusal to grant the audience safety. He establishes that the rotten corrupts anything that touches it and then proves it on screen with brutal practical effects. The violence arrives without musical warning. Rugna strips the score from the moments other horror films would underline, so the cruelty lands flat and sudden and without permission. The production design treats the contagion as physical rot. Animals turn, children turn, and the camera holds on the consequences long enough to make you complicit.
This is horror that operates on cause and effect rather than jump scares. The rules exist, the characters break them, and the film tracks every breakage to its ugly conclusion. Rugna denies the comfort of a final solution because comfort is not the point. The point is that evil moves through the world by exploiting human cowardice and stupidity. The film commits to that thesis with a discipline that most horror lacks.