The most disappointing aspect of last year’s clunky, jumpscare-reliant Curse of La Llorona (on the long list of failures of the latest bland globe-trotting addition to the Conjuring franchise) was that it missed the point of its spurring mythology. The story of La Llorona, the crying woman, is not just about a child-stealing monster. It’s about inconsolable grief that spills out into the mortal world.
In La Lorrona, the chilling supernatural drama by Guatemalan filmmaker Jayro Bustamante, the grief is that felt by the Ixil, the Mayan population of the remote Sierra de los Cuchumatanes. In the early 1980s, they were targeted in a rape and murder campaign of ethnic cleansing, under the claim that they were hiding anti-government guerrillas. Bustamante grasps that blade of real-life horror unflinchingly: General Enrique Monteverde (Diaz, a dead ringer for actual Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt) is on trial for genocide, and running the oldest play in the mass murderer’s book: feign senility. His family knows he’s playing a part, and they sit by rather than even accept his or their complicity. Their studied and mannered gentility cannot last in the face of the crowds of protesters that sporadically intrude upon their genteel lies – often explosively, shockingly – and retreat behind the walls of their mansion. They’re forced to hire another maid (being a retired director has its perks) and so bring in another native servant, Alma (Coroy). She is Kaqchikel, a different Mayan people to the Ixil and so slightly more acceptable to clean and tend in this plutocratic household, even if the family must now endure papa’s lecherous eye for her, and his increasingly dangerous proclamations about guerrillas hiding in the attic, and a woman’s voice whispering at night.
Beyond the title, the elegant, calm, and unnerving La Llorona has nothing in common with the bland big budget namesake. If it has real cinematic kin, it’s the much harsher and more grotesque A Serbian Film, or the darkly comedic Cold Sweat – even (and especially in the trial sequences) Costa-Gavras’ Music Box. All those films deal with the unresolved horror of dictatorship, of crimes against humanity not prosecuted, and of being on the wrong side of history. Here, the guilt of Enrique is without question, and he’s not contrite at any level. What is under the microscope are the systems that still give deference to monsters, and those that enable and benefit from them – the hangers-on, the loyalists, and most especially the family members who have to deny the truths they know. Bustamante balances the characters struggles with just enough ambiguity about what the cause is, whether it’s uncanny or just a delusion caused by the general’s paranoia and senility, to really twist the tension.
La Llorona is loaded with the political legacies of women in Latin and South America, much like Melina León’s recent examination of state-sanctioned baby-trafficking in Peru, Song Without a Name. Yet while her story concentrates on the indigenous women who suffered, Bustamante focuses on the women around the general, most especially his unrelenting wife, Carmen (Kénefic, a jagged Baccarat crystal in human form) and daughter, Natalia (De La Hoz). The younger Monteverde is brittle through denial that she can no longer sustain, and increasingly unsure of her father’s protestations of innocence about the disappearance of her own husband. Her minute responses during the film’s most emotionally harrowing scene – Ixil women under elaborate veils, recounting stories of abuse, assault, devastation with quiet restraint – reveals Bustamante’s real intent. After all, unquiet spirits can be quelled by candles and prayers. The violated soul of a nation cannot simply be healed or dispelled.
La Llorona is streaming on Shudder now.
This article appears in August 14 • 2020.
