La Llorona (2019)
There's a moment in La Llorona that perfectly sums up my frustration with the whole thing. A character hears a strange noise. He goes to investigate. The camera frames him cleverly, one room in sharp focus, the adjacent bedroom sitting open and empty behind him. I was braced. Leaning forward. Absolutely certain something was about to come creeping into that empty space. And then, nothing. The film just doesn't. It sets the table, brings you to the table, and then takes the food away without a word of explanation.
That sums up Jayro Bustamante's 2019 film for me. It's a bait-and-switch, and frankly, a rather maddening one. What's advertised, or at least what the folklore surrounding La Llorona promises, is a proper spine-chilling ghost story rooted in the legend of the weeping woman. What you actually get is a dry political thriller with some supernatural elements clumsily bolted on around the edges, like an afterthought someone remembered in post-production.
Now, I want to be fair. I can see what Bustamante is reaching for. Using the La Llorona myth as a lens through which to examine the Guatemalan genocide is, on paper, an interesting idea. Folklore and political horror have a long, fertile history together, and there's genuine potential in that collision. The ambition isn't the problem. The execution is. Because somewhere along the way, the film seems to forget that it has to actually be horrifying to make the horror mean something. It gets so wrapped up in its own solemnity, so concerned with being Serious and Important, that it forgets to unsettle you. And if you're not unsettled, the whole enterprise loses its teeth.
The missed opportunities pile up. Every time the film inches toward genuine dread, it pulls back. The tension fizzles out into atmosphere without incident, and atmosphere without incident is just mood. Mood is fine. Mood is not enough. I kept waiting for the film to commit to its own premise, and it never quite did.
I've been watching quite a bit of Latin American horror recently, and by comparison, La Llorona feels particularly toothless. Demián Rugna's When Evil Lurks is the obvious counterpoint here. That film understands something crucial: if you want to use horror to make a political point, you first have to actually horrify your audience. You have to earn the metaphor by making the experience visceral. When Evil Lurks does that without apology or hesitation. La Llorona flinches every time it should lunge.
There's also something slightly uncomfortable about how the film handles its own subject matter. The Guatemalan genocide deserves serious, unflinching treatment, and I'm not sure grafting it onto an undercooked supernatural thriller quite does it justice. It risks turning genuine historical trauma into texture, a backdrop against which a ghost story that never fully materialises plays out. I found myself thinking of Turtles Can Fly, which tackles a similarly harrowing political context and does so with an immediacy and a rawness that this film never approaches.
What you're left with is a picture trying to have it both ways, aiming for the thoughtful end of political drama and the visceral end of supernatural horror, and landing squarely in the middle of neither. It's well-intentioned. The craft on show isn't without merit. There's genuine atmosphere in places. But good intentions and interesting ideas only carry you so far when the film keeps declining its own invitations to be scary.
For those who came for the ghost story, specifically, it's a proper letdown. Two stars.
Rating: ★★ | Year: 2019 | Watched: 2026-07-13
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