Guatemalan director Jayro Bustamante’s 2019 political horror film La Llorona —surely the only Criterion release of a Shudder channel original—mixes recent Guatemalan history with the titular Latin American myth about a woman who drowns her children. Inspired by the 2013 trial of Guatemalan military dictator Efraín Ríos Montt—charged with committing genocide during the years 1981-83 in the country’s three-decade-plus civil war—the film opens with the trial of General Enrique Monteverde (Julio Díaz), who after being found guilty retreats to his home surrounded by family inside and protestors outside.
The superstitious Mayan native servants summarily depart, except for their head, Valeriana (María Telón), who is tasked with finding replacements as the family endures the drumming and chanting of the people amassed outside their windows (a few shattered by thrown rocks). Three generations of women related to the general are housebound with him: his wife Carmen (Margarita Kénefic), who dutifully stands by her husband; their daughter Natalia (Sabrina de la Hoz), a nurse who tends to her chain-smoking, alcohol-swilling father while purposefully ignoring horrible truths (Natalia’s own husband mysteriously disappeared some time ago); and Natalia’s schoolgirl daughter Sara (Ayla-Elea Hurtado), who is familiar with the terrible accusations against her grandfather (thanks to the Internet).
Into this tense situation walks a woman named Alma (María Mercedes Coroy), who works as a maid. Dressed in white, with long black hair, Valeriana, who is momentarily surprised in the kitchen when the faucet spontaneously turns on gives the beautiful Alma a quick tour of the house. Water plays a large role in La Llorona, from Sara’s experiments holding her breath in the outside pool (the house sits within walls) to Carmen’s suffocating dreams of military crimes against children that leaves her bed soaked in urine.
In one of the film’s most eerie scenes, the general follows Alma—who he witnesses emerging from the pool dressed in her nightgown late in the evening—to the servant’s bathroom area where water is inexplicably laying inches deep on the floor. After rounding a corner, he spies Alma sitting naked on an overflowing tub staring back at him.
This sequence, among others, is reminiscent of haunting imagery in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, which Bustamante acknowledges as a primary influence, noting in particular that Kubrick could inject horror into daytime scenes as well as night ones.
La Llorona is a low-budget film that was shot quickly due to pressure from the current right-wing Guatemalan government that wants the past swept under the proverbial rug. Bustamante was lucky to film in the Guatemala City residence of French ambassador Jean-François Charpentier, who defied the government’s threats to cease production.
Presented with a 2K digital transfer, extras include a new interview with Bustamante, a “making-of” documentary featuring interviews with cast and crew, and a leaflet with an essay by journalist and novelist Francisco Goldman.
While the supernatural elements may put off political junkies and the absence of gore is unlikely to sate the bloodlust of horror fans, La Llorona —like the novels of Gabriel García Márquez and other Latin American authors—effectively employs magical realism to shine a light on the atrocities perpetrated by a repressive regime. Recommended.