Guatemala/France/Mexico. 2019.
Crew
Director/Original Idea – Jayro Bustamante, Screenplay – Jayro Bustamante & Lisandro Sanchez, Producers – Jayro Bustamante, Gustavo Mathieu, Marina Peralta & Georges Renard, Photography – Nicolas Wong Diaz, Music – Pascual Reyes, Production Design – Sebastian Muñoz. Production Company – La Casa de Produccion/Les Films du Volcan/Jalisco(Post)/Gekolor Studios/SoundTube Multimedia Studios/Tono Puro.
Cast
Maria Mercedes Coroy (Alma), Julio Diaz (General Enrique Monteverede), Margarita Kenefic (Carmen Monteverede), Sabrina de la Hoz (Natalia Monteverede), Maria Telon (Valeriana), Alya-Elea Hurtado (Sara Monteverede), Juan Pablo Olyslager (Letona)
Plot
The aging General Enrique Monteverde is on trial for the atrocities he oversaw as military leader of the junta that ruled Guatemala in the early 1980s. He is accused of having overseen or permitted the slaughter of thousands of the native Mayan peoples during this time, a charge he denies. He is convicted as guilty but the charge is overturned by the court. As crowds gather outside his house demanding justice, Enrique is forced to stay inside, along with his wife Carmen, their daughter Natalia and her young daughter Sara. Enrique is haunted by the sounds of a woman crying. After all the servants quit, they receive aid from Alma, a native girl, who signs on as a servant but comes to have a mysterious effect over the household
La Llorona or The Crying Woman is a Mexican folklore tale that originated in the 19th Century. According to the legend, La Llorona was a poor woman who married a nobleman. When he abandoned her for another woman, she drowned herself and their two children in the river. Denied entrance to Heaven for her deeds, she has spent eternity searching for her children and can always be heard weeping. She is in effect a boogeyman character and is reputed to steal other children believing them hers.
There have been several films based on La Llorona with the Mexican-made The Heritage of the Crying Woman (1947), The Curse of the Crying Woman (1963), Vengeance of the Crying Woman (1974) in which she meets the wrestling superhero Santo, Las Lloronas (2004), KM 31: Kilometre 31 (2006) and the animated The Legend of La Llorona (2011), and the US-made Spirit Hunter: La Llorona (2004), The Wailer (2006) and its sequel The Wailer 2 (2007), and J’ok-el (2007) and its sequels, Curse of La Llorona (2007), The Cry (2007), The Curse of La Llorona (2020) and The Legend of La Llorona (2022). This version of La Llorona came out four months after the high-profile James Wan-produced US-made take on the legend with The Curse of La Llorona (2019).
La Llorona was the third film for Guatemalan director/writer Jayro Bustamante who had previously gained festival acclaim with his non-genre dramas Ixcanul/Volcano (2015) and Tremors (2019).
La Llorona and The Curse of La Llorona are two films ostensibly about the same figure in Latin American folklore but each film plays to an entirely different audience. The Curse of La Llorona was the story appropriated by Hollywood, cleaned up and repackaged as the most Hollywood of things – a spinoff from a successful box-office franchise – and sold to horror audiences. By contrast, La Llorona played to festival crowds and arthouse theatres where people went to see it as an arts and cultural work rather than as a ghost story (although when it came to US distribution, it did end up on the Shudder network).
In fact, La Lorona puts the legend so much at the behest of the political story it wants to tell that it is barely a Ghost Story at all. It is but the ghost story element doesn’t seem that important to Jayro Bustamante. Moreover, he has changed the original legend of La Llorona to fit the political tale he wants to tell – now she appears to be the ghost of a native woman who was killed during the slaughter of her village during the atrocities who has come seeking vengeance against the man responsible. There is no longer anything to the story about the woman who drowned herself and her children after being abandoned by a nobleman.
The film draws from a specific point in Guatemalan history. In particular, what is being alluded to is the military dictatorship of General Jose Efrain Rios Montt between March 1982 and August 1983. The previous president was removed from office in a coup following an election that was widely seen as fraudulent and Montt, a previous presidential candidate, was installed by the junta. During his reign, Montt instituted a brutal and bloody crackdown against Marxist rebels amongst the native Mayan peoples that ended up killing some 200,000 people. After being removed from office, Montt later ran as a presidential candidate and won a seat in congress. He was placed on trial for crimes against humanity but the verdict was overturned on a technicality. A retrial was ordered but Montt died in 2018 before the trial could be completed.
Jayro Bustamate creates a fiction loosely based on the real-life characters. Julio Diaz gives a fine performance as the aging general and there is a great sense in those around him – the denials of his wife, the distrust shown by the servants, the daughter who starts to ask questions – of well papered-over secrets starting to show cracks amid the ironclad denials. This aspect the film does well.
Less effective is the ghost story aspect. Aside from the whispers Julio Diaz keeps hearing, it is only at the end that Jayro Bustamante allows the ghost story aspect to emerge. As the title character, Maria Mercedes Coroy, who is an actual Mayan Indian, has a haunting presence in the film. She is blank and has little more than a dozen lines of dialogue throughout – all the expression comes in her wide eyes. Yet her curiously subservient but quietly defiant personality also leads to something increasingly haunted.
Trailer here