Sundance 2020: La Llorona, Impetigore

Premiering under Sundance’s “Spotlight” selection (after previously making its way to the Venice and Toronto film festivals), is Jayro Bustamante’s “La Llorona,” a slow-burn horror movie that grapples with genocide in the director’s country of Guatemala, and a need for justice. It’s worth noting from the pitch that this isn’t the type of horror movie in which there’s a threat of a jack-in-the-box jump scare, or a disturbing monster waiting in the midst. Instead, it’s a vengeful spirit that gives the film its name, and the anger within “La Llorona” makes for a solemn and gripping tribute to real-life atrocities. 

“La Llorona” starts with a focus on a family of bad people, namely that of a general named Enrique (Julio Diaz), his wife, his daughter, and the general’s granddaughter, Sara (Ayla-Elea Hurtado). In the film’s opening moments, the general is awoken from his sleep by the sound of a woman crying. In the darkness, he grabs his gun, and walks through his dark house. The cries continue, until he almost shoots his wife on accident, after she appears behind him and startles him. 

Seconds later, we see the general in court. He has been accused of ordering genocide against the Mayan-Ixil people in 1981, a real atrocity related to the Guatemalan Civil War. In one of Bustamante’s many engrossing, very slow zooms out of someone’s close-up, a woman details the horrific events as just one of the people who was terrorized by Enrique’s actions. Meanwhile, a whole courtroom of people sit listening, flashing bulbs, acutely presenting a massive public scandal. Bustamante keeps the attention on the humanity, but creates a precise slow-burn with the visual style, a key aesthetic value evident throughout this impassioned, confident horror film. 

The general is found guilty until he’s then acquitted, and free to retreat back to his home in the city. But protesters remain outside of the gates, with pictures of their loved ones, singing songs. They are constantly heard in the background, especially when the house doors open to welcome a new maid named Alma (Maria Mercedes Coroy, previous of Bustamante’s also quietly gripping “Ixcanul”), who is meant to assist the only other maid there, Valeriana (Maria Telon). The heavy sobs return again, causing Enrique to cautiously walk through the house at night, in search of sounds that are haunting him and nobody else. 

In one of Bustamante’s most compelling narrative ambitions, the terror in the story involves following people that we would naturally want the worst for. And yet they are not simply villainous, even if the general’s family members have benefited from his power in the past. In a tricky balance that Bustamante pulls off, they become the surrogates for the unease that Bustamante conjures with mysterious things happening at night, though the story is not about them being killed off one by one. 

Bustamante previously conjured a searing moment of chaos in his film “Ixcanul,” in which an indigenous family sought desperate medical help in the bracing chaos of a bustling city at night. “La Llorona” contains some of that same tension between Indigenous people and those who have wronged them, and it adds to the movie’s searing quality. It walks a fine line of being almost too sullen, with its many morose performances, but that goes toward creating this thick atmosphere of grief, with the general and his family surrounded by it. The film’s most gripping visual does not come from something that’s frightening but instead powerful, in a way befitting Bustamante’s bold vision for political horror: all of the protesters outside the general’s home, standing in silence, looking straight up him, if not through him.