31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 29: La Llorona

2019.

We are not talking about The Curse of La Llorona, an American film that also released in 2019 about the Latin American folk monster. No, this La Llorona is a Guatemalan movie directed by Jayro Bustamante. There are no connections to the Conjuring Cinematic Universe today. The American movie made $100 million at the box office. The Guatemala La Llorona instead was critically-acclaimed and was very nearly nominated for Best International Feature Film at the 93rd Academy Awards. Sorry, I had to pick the cool obscure movie over the normie jump scare one.

That said, I do think La Llorona might have used a jump scare or two. This is definitely in the camp of arthouse horror, things like Relic or The Babadook. I love these kinds of A24/Neon cool indie movies, do not get me wrong. But they’re all slow-paced and rely entirely on atmosphere until the end. They build tension beautifully, edging you up further and further until great payoffs. But along the way you do kind of hunger for a ghost to pop out and go “boo!”. You can also feel something of a limited budget, since there are a lot of movies like It Comes at Night out there, all taking place in a single claustrophobic house. 

Sometimes your horror diet can be too wholesome, is all I’m saying.

La Llorona has good reason to stay classy though. This is not just about a haunted house in Central America, this is a haunted house with serious political history. The figure of La Llorona, the weeping woman, is kind a boogieman all across the Americas. (I'm White, so she never visited me as a child, I missed out.) La Llorona is a twisted maternal character who wanders wet places, searching for children to drown. But here, she’s an avenging creature of awful justice. This film is reshaping horror mythology like the recent reboot of Candyman.

The Guatemalan Genocide is not something much known about here in the US, which is itself a serious injustice. (Take a moment and look up what we did to that country for bananas in the 1960s in case you are unaware what a nice “big brother” we’ve been to the Guatemalan people.) After the US-backed coup, various military dictatorships for decades took part in a "Silent Genocide" of maybe as many as 200,000 people or even more. The victims, unsurprisingly, were largely the Mayan natives in the countryside.

Guatemala is a diverse country and a very unequal country. Spanish is just one of dozens of languages spoken, but unsurprisingly the urban Spanish-speaking elites hold much of the power (this is probably over-generalizing the situation a bit). La Llorona's backstory focuses on a massacres of villagers speaking the Kaqchikel language. Jayro Bustamante made headlines years earlier shooting a movie entirely in Kaqchikel, Ixcanul. I've seen claims that this was the very first time any movie had been made in that language, which shows how unrepresented these groups are.

In particular, La Llorona recreates the figure of General Efraín Ríos Montt, the Reagan-backed military dictator of Guatemala of the early Eighties, committed genocide in the Civil Wars of the Eighties, and in a weird twist, was later elected president in what appear to be fully democratic elections. (Real life is never so black and white.) In 2013, Montt was convicted of crimes against humanity by a Guatemalan court, before the Supreme Court demanded a retrial. Montt would never get that trial or face justice. He died of old age in 2018. La Llorona has the character of General Monteverde (Julio Diaz) as a naked fictional stand-in for Montt.

La Llorona is set mostly after Monteverde’s sentence is annulled by the Supreme Court, allowing him to return home. Furious protesters have the General and his family locked down under siege in their fancy estate. That leaves the General and his family trapped alone with nothing but their petulant rejection of reality and their many ghosts. The family includes Monteverde's wife Carmen (Margarita Kenéfic), their daughter Natalia (Sabrina De La Hoz), whose husband was disappeared by the regime, their granddaughter, Sara (Ayla-Elea Hurtado), and their loyal Kaqchikel housekeeper, Valeriana (María Telón), who is rumored to be the General’s illegitimate daughter. Joining them is a weeping woman that only the General can hear at night. This causes the entire Mayan staff to flee except Valeriana, because they know what movie they're in. The only replacement maid the family can find is a mysterious and beautiful young woman, Alma (María Mercedes Coroy), who is not what she seems.

There are few traditional scares in La Llorona until the very ending. It’s a very patient, measured film. It is made up of lots of long-takes and slow shots of the house at night. Only rarely does something jump at you, such as Alma's head appearing suddenly on frame. Alma is a fascinating figure, carrying frogs around, and wearing a plain white shift. She’s less a traditional horror villain than again, an icon of mood, as alluring as she is unearthly. The violence and most intense horror are locked away in dreams. Carmen in her nightmares faces karmic justices when she finds herself positioned as one of the mothers murdered by her husband. She is forced to watch as his soldiers drown her children.

Bustamante is not pulling punches at all on the political horror at work here. The ethnic difference between the light-skinned Monteverde family and their Kaqchikel workers is definitely on his mind. General Monteverde’s awfulness is impossible to ignore, even for his family. Carmen begins the movie with stock rants about "communists", before even she is forced to confront reality. Her eyes start to bleed, a symbol of her previous blindness. Nobody can look away when the General nearly murders his wife by accident, thinking a guerilla has snuck into his house. Nobody can look away when the old man creeps on Alma bathing and everybody, even his little granddaughter, catches him with a tent in his pants.

This is a family tearing apart, but also in a way, coming together. The women have each other in the end and can beg forgiveness. The universe of this film has no mercy for the General, who deserves none. The final scene shows us the universe is not done with this one villain either, it has a hit-list of untouchable old men that will not go unpunished. A boogiewoman is coming for all of them.

And that's really the fantasy at play here. Horror can be a vehicle for desires you can never speak otherwise. Sometimes that fantasy is reprehensible, like how Eighties slashers seem to truly despise sexually-active women. Sometimes that fantasy is empowering like yesterday's movie, Revenge or the class warfare of Ready or Not. In La Llorona's case, it is another violent desire. You cannot say "somebody should just destroy the lives of war criminals" without looking like a maniac, but you can play it out with a ghost story. When there is such a lack of real justice in the real world, at least we can at least find some in horror.

Next time we travel to 2020, the year of 2020, 2020, 2020, 2020, 2020, 2020, 2020… *stares bleakly into the distance, shaking slightly*... and more 2020, and our next movie, Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba the Movie: Mugen Train.