La Llorona, Guatemalan director Jayro Bustamante’s taut, effective new horror film, is an act of reinvention.
’s taut, effective new horror film, is an act of reinvention—one of many for the nightmarish ghost of its title, a staple of Latin American folklore
It’s quite a bedtime story. Bustamante’s way into it, however, seems circuitous at first. We start not just with a wailing woman, but with a reckoning. Enrique is an ailing, retired general on trial for his role in Guatemala’s civil war, during which—we learn from testimony at the trial—the general is said to have overseen the brutal murders of countless indigenous Guatamalans, an outright genocide on the nation’s Mayan-Ixil population performed in the name of anti-communism.
All are somewhat bewitched by the strange woman Alma, driven to visions, even, for reasons that are probably obvious but which I still won’t spoil outright. Regardless, Coroy’s performance here is vital: a quietness that falls short of rectitude or deference, a mysteriousness that resists encouraging suspicion. Bustamante makes quite a bit of the general’s uncluttered yet somehow still claustrophobic mansion, and half the the magic of that, I think, is owed to the ways he stages his actors.
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