Review: Guatemala's Oscar submission "La Llorona"
Friday, December 18, 2020 at 3:00PM
by Nick Taylor
Three cheers for the Boston Society of Film Critics, who kicked off this year’s wave of critics prizes with an amazingly idiosyncratic list of winners and runners-up. Capping their day off with their Foreign Language Film category, they honored Jayro Bustamente’s political ghost story La Llorona, with The Painted Bird in second place. La Llorona has been selected as Guatemala’s submission for International Film at the Oscars, making this the second of Bustamente’s films to be submitted after his astonishing debut Ixcanul in 2015. Three more cheers for Cláudio Alves, whose heroically long FYC thread on Twitter has informed a lot of my recent choices for which 2020 films to catch up with.
La Llorona’s opening credits are delivered over a black background with white text, while a woman’s quiet, hurried, forceful prayers can be heard. Our first real image of the film is a close-up on the speaker’s face, revealed to be an older white woman (Margarita Kenéfic), back straight and eyes unwavering as she stares directly into the lens and asks for protection for herself and her family against those who seek them harm...
The camera slowly pulls back to reveal her as part of a group of women sitting around a large table, fingertips barely touching, all lost in their own prayers while another young woman stands in the back of the room. The cold pallor of the cinematography, emphasizing blacks and whites without neglecting the other colors and textures in the shot, gives this tableau a cold, unnatural aura, as though they’re either warding off a great evil or summoning one to do their bidding.
As it turns out, the house is already haunted, but that’s not what they’re praying against. They are the wives of a group of well-off former dictators who successfully orchestrated the genocide of Guatemala’s native Mayan population in the 1980’s. The reason they’re praying for their husbands is that the most senior of these men, General Enrique Monteverde (Julio Diaz), is currently being tried for genocide, and every one of those men are aware that if he’s found guilty the courts will come for them too.
They’re too old to survive prison, and can only hope to fight those charges on the grounds that annihilating the Mayans was symptomatic of a larger war against communism. Monteverde spends the night before the final stretch of the trial following the voice of a weeping woman through his home, turning off a shower started by no one and brandishing a gun to track this intruder down. All he achieves is almost shooting his wife in the head when she startles him. Monteverde’s all-Mayan staff flee the next morning despite threats that no one else will hire them, with only the unwaveringly loyal Valeriana (María Telón, the mother from Ixcanul) staying behind and sending an advert back to her home village, a community she believes is too impoverished for many workers to refuse the offer. It’s implied the servants may know what’s going on, but they don’t stick around long enough to reveal this.
The trial concludes half an hour into the film, with Bustamente showing us the testimony of one beleaguered victim as a stand-in for the hundreds of Indigenous folks (mostly women, judging by the gallery) who spoke of the rape, pillaging, ans torture they suffered at the hands of soldiers while loved ones were brutally slain and their villages were destroyed. The judge delivers a guilty verdict that’s undone by higher courts almost as soon as it’s announced, leaving Guatemala’s public and international communities outraged at the blatant mishandling of justice. Monteverde is hospitalized and sent home to recover, virtually trapped in his house while hundreds of protestors chant and sing and demand his head every day and night. With him is his wife Carmen (Kenéfic), his daughter Natalia (Sabrina De La Hoz), Natalia’s kid Sara (Ayla-Elea Hurtado), his bodyguard Letona (Juan Pablo Olslayger, the lead of Bustamante’s Temblores), and Valeriana.
Only one person from Valeriana’s village accepts her ad, a young woman named Alma (María Mercedes Coroy, the lead of Ixcanul) who glides through the crowd of protestors without once being noticed by any of them while making eye contact with Natalia in her second-story bedroom. From the distortions of the impeccable sound design as Alma walks through the wall of protestors to the slow, unsubtly menacing close-up on Coroy’s sphinx-like face, La Llorona is not particularly interested in hiding her role as the titular ghost. No one even bothers to name-drop the folklore, though the fact that Bustmante is recuperating her into a figure of vengeance instead of regret would probably make such an explanation unnecessary, let alone more thematically blunt. Her story is gradually revealed to the audience and the Monteverdes, with some elements stated outright and some intuitively grasped without ever needing to be verbalized. I wouldn’t call the film an acting showcase per say, but the characterizations are uniformly strong, and Coroy’s enigmatic hold on the camera goes a long way to make Alma as grounded or spectral or implacably menacing as she needs to be in any given scene.
Then again, perhaps no one has the time to notice her while they’re so wrapped up in their own demons, be they internalized conundrums or literal hauntings. Natalia is dealing with nascent ideas of her father’s criminality and reconsidering the mysterious disappearance of Sara’s father before she was born. Carmen is frightened by her husband’s apparent mental collapse, and is suddenly plagued by terribly vivid dreams of running through a field from advancing troopers with two children clinging to her side. Enrique, unburdened by guilt towards his actions, is still hunting La Llorona through his house at night, becoming more desperate to follow her lures and catch her while the last members of his household become ever-more terrified of his ravings and weaponry. Valenciana’s rapport with Alma, a mixture of hometown companionship and growing unease, is one of the few aspects of the film that feels underexplored, especially as Carmen makes some crass suggestions about why she’s so loyal to their family. For her part, Sara mostly hangs out with Alma when the latter isn’t working, playing games and talking about their lives. One of these days Sara might hold her breath underwater longer than Alma does.
You couldn’t ascribe any single character or debate as the center of La Llorona, but it nevertheless navigates multiple sources of tension while feeding them into a primary mood of contemplative dread. Bustamente conjures an aura of genuine suspense that punctuates and capitalizes itself at surprising moments. The rhythm of its scares are never predictable, even as its characters barrel towards an increasingly pre-ordained reckoning, and the water motif of La Llorona herself is artfully maintained in image and sound. A major asset is Nicólas Wong's wide framing, knowing how to block characters for choreographed scares and when to submerge them in Stygian pits of inkly blackness. The images of unreality around Alma are particularly spellbinding, whether it’s amping up a relatively mundane action like her hair blowing in the wind to unsettling proportions or watching her dip underneath the family pool in the space where Sara was floating a moment before. The expert, slinking modulations of the sound design and deep, rumbling score keep us on edge while feeding aspects of the character’s psychology much like Zama does, showing us the turmoils of deeply privileged individuals while asking the audience what value there is in their belated attempts at empathy and self-knowledge. The cherry on top of the sound design may be the constant wall of sound from the protestors outside the Monteverde, lively with outrage as well as celebration and despair, ensuring the rest of the country is not an abstract of noise and bodies but an entire collection of beings whose judgements must be heard.
This balancing act of layered portraiture and salient political critique is not just relevant to the film’s generic fluidity but to the thorny, provocative questions it’s premised on. How does one quantify the worth of political institutions meant to punish wrongdoings when something as obvious and cruel as the genocide of one’s own people is not allowed to be a punishable offense, even if everyone knows they committed this crime? Will dying before anyone claims judgment on this man be a satisfactory end? Can his demise at the hands of one woman on behald of literally thousands of victims possibly stand as proper justice for the harm he’s done? In a bracing ten-minute concluding sequence that manages to boldface several of La Llorona’s threads of conflict without simplifying their power, Alma gets her revenge on those we might label as the guiltiest members of House Monteverde through an entirely unexpected conduit. It’s a gratifying scene, yet everything the film has been about til now prevents us from being totally satisfied, instead leaving us to wonder if this is enough. What will come next? Will these wounds heal? Then again, the very last scene of La Llorona shows us that Alma is not done seeking justice for the crimes she suffered, and if we’ve learned anything from what Bustamente has shown us about political comeuppance and spiritual vengeance, I wish her nothing but the best.
Grade: B+
La Llorona is currently streaming on Shudder
Reader Comments (4)
After the award from the Boston Critics, I looked up more about this film, and am excited to see it this weekend.
Maybe this will help bring more attention to Ixcanul, an absolutely devastating gut-punch of a movie, and one of the best films of the decade If La Llarona is in the same class, then Bustamente will be a name to be reckoned with.
Good news. La Llarona is great and anything that helps get it seen my more viewers is a good thing. Here's hoping for the Oscar nod. Could it win? Doubtful, but you never know.
This film has been in my Shudder queue for a while now and I'll be sure to watch it soon.