La Llorona (2019)
The legend of La Llorona, the wailing woman who drowned her own children and now wanders waterways weeping for them, is one of the most enduring pieces of folklore across Latin America. Versions of it predate the Spanish conquest, and the figure has since been absorbed into everything from nursery warnings to exploitation horror. Guatemalan director Jayro Bustamante, whose debut feature Ixcanul (2015) announced him as one of the more serious voices in Central American cinema, uses the myth here as a lens through which to examine something far more concrete: the prosecution of Efraín Ríos Montt, the former Guatemalan dictator who stood trial in 2013 for genocide against the Ixil Maya people during the early 1980s. That trial, the first time a head of state had been prosecuted for genocide in a domestic court, ended in a conviction that was overturned within days on procedural grounds. Ríos Montt died in 2018, never having served a sentence. Bustamante fictionalises this history with a character called General Enrique Monteverde, and the film carries the weight of that source material in almost every frame.
Produced through a coalition of Guatemalan and French production houses, including La Casa de Producción and Les Films du Volcan, with support from the Guatemalan Ministry of Culture, La Llorona is a co-production that clearly benefited from international backing without losing its regional specificity. Bustamante was working within a relatively modest budget, and the decision to confine most of the action to a single mansion, besieged from outside by protesters, is partly a practical one and partly a deliberate formal choice. It is the same instinct that drives chamber horror as a genre: shrink the world, increase the pressure. The film debuted at the Venice Film Festival and later screened at Sundance, earning considerable critical goodwill for its political seriousness. It is the kind of film that collects praise more readily at festivals than it does strong reactions from genre audiences, which is perhaps telling. If you have seen Bustamante's work on Tremors (2019, not the American monster film), you will recognise his fondness for slow-burn tension and social allegory, though he has rarely pushed as far into genre territory as he attempts to here.
The cast is anchored by Julio Díaz as the imperious, deteriorating General Monteverde, a performance that manages to be both pitiable and quietly monstrous without ever quite tipping into caricature. Margarita Kénefic plays his wife Carmen with a kind of rigid, wilful blindness that feels painfully recognisable. The more arresting presence is María Mercedes Coroy, who appeared in Ixcanul and brings a watchful, unsettling stillness to her role here as a new servant who arrives at the compound under circumstances that are, to put it plainly, suspicious. Sabrina De La Hoz and María Telón round out the household, and collectively the ensemble creates a convincing portrait of a family sealed inside its own mythology. It is, in many ways, a polished but unremarkable production on the surface, with Luis Armando Arteaga's cinematography giving the interiors a muted, airless quality that suits the material. Whether the film does justice to its own ambitions is another question, and one that Macca is rather better placed than I am to answer.
Jayro Bustamante’s 2019 film La Llorona made me fully brace for a proper, spine-chilling ghost story, only to find myself watching a rather dry political thriller with some folklore elements clumsily tacked on.
It is a classic bait-and-switch, and frankly, a rather frustrating one. While I can appreciate the director’s ambition to use the legendary weeping woman myth to comment on the Guatemalan genocide, the execution feels like it forgot what genre it was actually supposed to be. If you are looking for a genuine scare, you will be left thoroughly disappointed.
The film’s inability to commit to its own horror premise is maddening, particularly when it sets up perfectly good opportunities for a fright and then completely chickens out. There is an early sequence where a character hears a strange noise in the bathroom and goes to investigate. The camera perspective cleverly frames him in one room with a direct, unobstructed view into the adjacent bedroom. As a horror fan, I was fully expecting something properly spooky to unfold in that empty space. Instead, the film just doesn't. It misses so many obvious, pulse-pounding opportunities like that, leaving the tension to fizzle out into nothing.
Having watched a fair few South American horror films recently, I can safely say this ranks among the more disappointing entries in the genre. When you look at what the region is capable of producing (take, for instance, the relentless, unapologetic terror of Demián Rugna’s When Evil Lurks or even El Conte) Bustamante’s offering feels incredibly toothless.
When Evil Lurks understands that to make a political point through horror, you first have to actually be horrifying. La Llorona, by contrast, is far too concerned with its own solemnity to ever truly unsettle you.
This is a picture that tries to have its cake and eat it too, resulting in a film that is neither a gripping political drama nor an effective supernatural scare-fest. It is a well-intentioned effort that simply misjudges its audience and squanders its atmospheric potential. For those of us who came for the ghost story, it is a massive letdown.
That tension between political seriousness and genre expectation is not unique to La Llorona. Films that use horror as a vehicle for historical reckoning, in the way that something like Turtles Can Fly uses children's experience as a frame for geopolitical catastrophe, or the way America drapes personal trauma over collective wound, are always walking a difficult line. The supernatural element has to earn its place, otherwise it reads as decoration on top of subject matter that is already harrowing enough on its own terms. Genre audiences, rightly, expect the rules to be honoured; and fans of slow, meditative political drama may find the horror trappings intrusive. Bustamante seems unwilling to fully commit to either constituency, which is a gamble that does not quite pay off here. La Llorona is a film with genuine conviction about what it wants to say, surrounded by considerable uncertainty about how to say it. The legend it borrows from has survived centuries because it carries real emotional force. Whether this particular telling does the same is, on the evidence above, doubtful.
Rating: ★★ | Year: 2019 | Watched: 2026-07-13
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for La Llorona (2019) on YouTube
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