With human justice absent in the awful political bloodshed in Central America, Guatemalan director Jayro Bustamente finds payback in cinematic fantasy. A crooked government exonerates a genocidal general, but his estate is besieged around the clock by Mayan-Ixil Indio protesters. Into the house comes a new maid — a tiny young woman who may nevertheless wield supernatural powers. The moody art-horror show is as delicate as The Innocents or a Val Lewton chiller — horror once again becomes an excellent means to address political evil. Slow and deliberate, it reverberates with horror history without copying the classics.
La Llorona (2019)
Blu-ray
The Criterion Collection 1156
2019 / Color / 2:39 widescreen / 96 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date October 18, 2022 / 39.95
Starring: María Mercedes Coroy, Sabrina De La Hoz, Margarita Kenéfic, Julio Diaz, María Telón, Juan Pablo Olyslager, Ayla-Elea Hurtado.
Cinematography: Nicolás Wong
Production Designer: Sebastián Muñoz
Costume Design: Beatriz Lantán
Film Editors: Jayro Bustamante, Gustavo Matheu
Original...
La Llorona (2019)
Blu-ray
The Criterion Collection 1156
2019 / Color / 2:39 widescreen / 96 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date October 18, 2022 / 39.95
Starring: María Mercedes Coroy, Sabrina De La Hoz, Margarita Kenéfic, Julio Diaz, María Telón, Juan Pablo Olyslager, Ayla-Elea Hurtado.
Cinematography: Nicolás Wong
Production Designer: Sebastián Muñoz
Costume Design: Beatriz Lantán
Film Editors: Jayro Bustamante, Gustavo Matheu
Original...
- 10/22/2022
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
This review of “La Llorona” was first published following its premiere at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.
For his third and most tonally adventurous feature to date, socially perceptive writer-director Jayro Bustamante repurposes one of Latin America’s most ubiquitous supernatural legends to fiercely examine genocide against indigenous people in his native Guatemala. Invoking genre narrative devices, the entrancingly evocative “La Llorona” (“The Weeping Woman”) walks between fact and myth to engender a shrewdly frightening piece of political horror.
Sadistic military dictator General Enrique Monteverde (Julio Diaz), a fictionalized incarnation of the country’s former president Efraín Ríos Montt, stands accused of sanctioning the murder of thousands of Maya Ixil people in the Central American nation between 1982 and 1983. Battling health complications but still refusing to accept any fault, Monteverde is found guilty thanks to the courageous testimony of Ixil women still mourning their dead. Bustamante shoots the courtroom as a spiritual confessional devoid of natural light.
For his third and most tonally adventurous feature to date, socially perceptive writer-director Jayro Bustamante repurposes one of Latin America’s most ubiquitous supernatural legends to fiercely examine genocide against indigenous people in his native Guatemala. Invoking genre narrative devices, the entrancingly evocative “La Llorona” (“The Weeping Woman”) walks between fact and myth to engender a shrewdly frightening piece of political horror.
Sadistic military dictator General Enrique Monteverde (Julio Diaz), a fictionalized incarnation of the country’s former president Efraín Ríos Montt, stands accused of sanctioning the murder of thousands of Maya Ixil people in the Central American nation between 1982 and 1983. Battling health complications but still refusing to accept any fault, Monteverde is found guilty thanks to the courageous testimony of Ixil women still mourning their dead. Bustamante shoots the courtroom as a spiritual confessional devoid of natural light.
- 3/4/2021
- by Carlos Aguilar
- The Wrap
Horror is woven into political drama in La Llorona, the riveting Golden Globe Foreign Language Film nominee and shortlisted International Feature Oscar contender from Guatemala’s Jayro Bustamante. An elderly wealthy man hears ghostly noises in the night. He is revealed to be former army general Enrique Monteverde (Julio Diaz), on trial for genocide. In court, Mayan-Ixil women give heartbreaking testimonies about systemic rape and murder by his men. At home, his own family begins to question his innocence of sex crimes and war crimes. Is Enrique being haunted by the eponymous La Llorona, the weeping woman of legend who cries for her lost children?
This question is not directly posed, but most of the domestic staff soon bolt out of fear. Enrique is left at home with his wife, daughter and granddaughter — trapped as protesters surround the mansion. Aside from his increasingly necessary security guard, the former general’s...
This question is not directly posed, but most of the domestic staff soon bolt out of fear. Enrique is left at home with his wife, daughter and granddaughter — trapped as protesters surround the mansion. Aside from his increasingly necessary security guard, the former general’s...
- 2/26/2021
- by Anna Smith
- Deadline Film + TV
Reviews of Jayro Bustamante’s “La Llorona” (“The Weeping Woman”) are obligated to mention that this quiet and trembling phantasmagoria about the ghosts of the Guatemalan Civil War has virtually nothing to do with Michael Chaves’ “The Curse of La Llorona,” the schlocky jump-scare machine that Warner Bros. released last spring. Aside from their shared roots in the same piece of Latin American folklore, these two films couldn’t have less in common; one is a slow-burn séance for the victims of a recent genocide, and the other is a PG-13 studio programmer that was only produced because of its ridiculous margins ($122 million in ticket sales against a $9 million budget is a job well done).
And yet, maybe it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if critics let their readers assume a more direct connection between these wildly different visions of death. While anyone who subscribes to...
And yet, maybe it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if critics let their readers assume a more direct connection between these wildly different visions of death. While anyone who subscribes to...
- 1/25/2020
- by David Ehrlich
- Indiewire
Guatamalan writer-director Jayro Bustamante had a dream debut with “Ixcanul” in 2015: The richly textured folk drama premiered in Competition at Berlin and won him the Alfred Bauer Prize, before going on to healthy international arthouse exposure. So it’s surprising that Bustamante’s subsequent work, while amply delivering on his first feature’s promise, has been comparatively sidelined in major festival programs. Earlier this year, his superb gay drama “Tremors” was demoted to Berlin’s lower-profile Panorama section; now “La Llorona,” his swift, thrilling, genre-expanding follow-up, has unspooled on the Lido in the external Venice Days sidebar — duly winning the top prize. By any measure, Bustamante’s latest is meaty, adventurous auteur cinema that would be of prime competition standard at any major fest: A nervy alternative horror film in which political ghosts of the past mingle with more uncanny phantoms, it ought to be the filmmaker’s most widely distributed work to date.
- 9/16/2019
- by Guy Lodge
- Variety Film + TV
Plenty as twenty-one Golden Lion hopefuls can offer, leaving the Venice Film Festival without having ventured beyond the fest’s official lineup and into its parallel sidebars would be a missed opportunity. Aside from the notorious Horizons (Orizzonti)—a competitive selection running parallel to the official lineup and designed to showcase new trends in cinema—the festival invites you to explore a panoply of other programs and events, including Out of Competition slots, a selection of restored masterworks (Venice Classics), a virtual reality section (Venice Vr), and independent sidebars such as the International Critics Week and Venice Days (Giornate degli Autori), an independent program modeled on Cannes’ Directors' Fortnight. Now at my fifth year here on the Lido, I must confess I am yet to step foot on the island of Lazzaretto Vecchio, home to the Venice Vr screenings—a trip that would be well worth the ticket, if anything...
- 9/2/2019
- MUBI
San Sebastian — In one of the banner deals at this year’s San Sebastian, Vicente Canales’ Film Factory Ent, the sales agent on “Wild Tales,” “The Clan” and now Argentine Oscar entry “El Angel,” has pounced on world sales rights to “La Llorona,” which stars the female leads of Bustamante’s Berlin awarded debut “Ixcanul.”
Deal was struck at this year’s San Sebastian Europe-Latin America Co-production Forum, where “La Llorona” walked off with one of the top prizes, the EFADs-caci Co-production Grant, adjudicated by Europe and Latin America’s powerful state film agencies, from the BFI to France’s Cnc, Mexico’s Imcine or Argentina’s Incaa, a sign that “La Llorona” is the kind of film that these government film funds want to encourage.
Backed by French investor George Renard, who will serve as associate producer, “La Llorona” is scheduled to shoot from this December, Bustamante said. If ready,...
Deal was struck at this year’s San Sebastian Europe-Latin America Co-production Forum, where “La Llorona” walked off with one of the top prizes, the EFADs-caci Co-production Grant, adjudicated by Europe and Latin America’s powerful state film agencies, from the BFI to France’s Cnc, Mexico’s Imcine or Argentina’s Incaa, a sign that “La Llorona” is the kind of film that these government film funds want to encourage.
Backed by French investor George Renard, who will serve as associate producer, “La Llorona” is scheduled to shoot from this December, Bustamante said. If ready,...
- 9/27/2018
- by John Hopewell
- Variety Film + TV
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