La llorona (2019)

Directed by: Jayro Bustamante | 97 minutes | drama, horror | Actors: María Mercedes Coroy, Sabrina De La Hoz, Margarita Kenéfic, Julio Diaz, María Telón, Juan Pablo Olyslager, Ayla-Elea Hurtado, Pedro Javier Silva Lira

The well-known Latin American folktale about la Llorona (the ‘weeping woman’) is about a mother who saw her children die – or sometimes killed herself – and, weeping, goes in search of them, usually at night and usually in the near the water. The exact facts of the story can vary by country or region, but usually comes down to the fact that the crying woman herself has died and her wandering soul will only find rest when she has found her children. In the meantime, she instills fear by taking revenge on other people’s children.

The water that often surrounds her can refer to her tears but also to the river along which she traditionally appears – often the Rio Grande. Countless songs, stories and images exist about ‘the weeping’, and to this series of stories the Guatemalan director Jayro Bustamante has now added his version. A contemporary, political and also surprisingly creepy version. The setting is today’s Guatemala, with a major lawsuit in the background in which former army commander Enrique Monteverde is found guilty of his part in the genocide, but goes free due to a mistake. The old Monteverde is portrayed eerily accurately after the ex-dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, who was convicted in 2013 but who died in 2018. We begin the story through the eyes of the family of the now elderly Monteverde who, together with his rigid wife and daughter who increasingly doubts her parents, has to hide in his spacious villa after the verdict because hundreds of angry demonstrators are protesting outside against the wrongful acquittal.

When the entire household staff – all from nearby Maya communities – decide to resign after the acquittal; No longer working for the man responsible for the murder of their parents and grandparents, the family faces a problem. Only the permanent ‘main housekeeper’, who has worked for the family for decades, remains. She struggles to recruit a new servant, the mysterious but beautiful Alma (María Mercedes Coroy, also the star in Bustamante’s ‘Ixcanul’). From the day she joins the service, the family’s gruesome past begins to take revenge. The supernatural problems start small, Monteverde hears noises at night (crying), but his wife and daughters blame this on his incipient dementia. The ominous events soon follow, and Alma always has a part in them. Water is also central to the increasingly eerie course of the story – Alma and Monteverde’s granddaughter in the pool or shower, dripping hair, wet floors. Later we will understand why Alma is inextricably and tragically linked to the water. The family is increasingly questioned about the mystery-shrouded Alma, but also about the real part of paterfamilias Monteverde in the past of their country.

It is not a strange choice by the committed filmmaker Bustamante (whom we know from minor hits ‘Ixcanul’ from 2015 and ‘Temblores’ from 2019), to base the third film in his national-political triptych on this legend. The story of the ‘crying woman’ is more often associated with the mass murder of the indigenous people of Latin America with the arrival and colonization of the Europeans. The link to the recent genocide in Guatemala, which took place during the civil war from 1960 to 1969, is easily made. Under the leadership of army chief Ríos Montt, tens of thousands of people were murdered in the early 1980s, almost all of them among the Maya population.

Bustamante naturally knows how to weave all this history and symbolism into a gripping narrative that often misleads the viewer. Every now and then the references are a bit over the top, but for that the eminently non-subtle horror genre has been cleverly chosen by Bustamante. By giving the film a fierce but credible tension, the political and social charge does not have to be subtle, and as a viewer you can be horrified at the supernatural and horrified at the oh-so-true at the same time. A particularly convincing combination.