La Llorona is a supernatural revenge story about a real atrocity - while Enrique is fictional, the horrific Guatemalan genocide and resulting war crimes trials are very much not. And as the siege continues, Enrique’s paranoia begins turning to violence. Her arrival exacerbates tensions within the family, revealing buried animosities. A beautiful young woman named Alma (María Mercedes Coroy) appears at the door asking for work. Their servants abandon the house after Enrique begins to hear mysterious weeping. Inside, however, the family is tormented by disturbing dreams and subtle-but-inexplicable phenomena. When a court overturns his war crimes conviction, mass protests break out and his whole family - including Natalia’s own daughter, whose father has disappeared - retreats into their home. Enrique is an unrepentant but increasingly sickly war criminal, reluctantly tolerated by his wife Carmen (Margarita Kenéfic) and daughter Natalia (Sabrina De La Hoz). In near-present-day Guatemala, retired general Enrique (Julio Diaz) is facing long-delayed charges of genocide against the country’s indigenous people. But unlike many similar films, La Llorona is also grounded in a specific social and political setting, with a ghoulish sense of justice that would feel right at home in a Twilight Zone episode. Between those first and final scenes, viewers get a slice of languorous, gothic horror about a family that’s slowly breaking down under the weight of its old sins. Then it takes a big step back into reality, and Bustamente spends most of the film building toward a payoff. La Llorona establishes immediately that it’s a ghost story, opening with a man hearing mysterious sobbing in his house. And the result is a unique, dread-inducing twist on a widely adapted tale.
But Guatemalan director Jayro Bustamante weaves the legend into a broader parable about the generations-long fallout of a genocide.
La Llorona is technically about La Llorona, the weeping spirit of a woman cursed for drowning her children. This is unfortunate, because it’s going to confuse a lot of people who hear about the contemporaneous La Llorona - an excellent indie movie that puts a supernatural twist on a story of very human horror. In 2019, the blockbuster Conjuring franchise produced a film called The Curse of La Llorona, which is generally considered pretty bad. This review comes from the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases.
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