La Llorona

"The fantastic level and the realistic level are the two levels upon which we live," Richard Burton said in The Night of the Iguana. La Llorona not to be confused with the Curse/Legend of La Llorona operates equally well on both levels, which in this case we might re-label the legendary level and the historical level.

Enrique Monteverde (Julio Díaz) is an aging, infirm, and paranoid Guatemalan dictator (but then arent they all, eventually?) who at the beginning of the film is being tried for the genocide of Ma-yan natives in the 1980s.

We see two trial scenes; the most effective is a zoom-in of a K'iche' Mayan indigenous woman giving testimony of the atrocities she witnessed, and to which she was subjected, by soldiers of the Guatem...

'La Llorona' is too slow paced for my liking, it most certainly isn't a bad film though. I just couldn't lock on to what I was watching, every now and then it would hook me in but then I mostly detached again not long later. That's a shame, because there is goodness in this.

It's more political drama than horror, not that the latter element is absent but I was anticipating more supernatural to this. That's mostly on me admittedly, probably not helped by the fact that I saw 'The Curse of La Llorona' (also 2019, curiously) last month; that is a more typical horror flick, which I (unlike most) liked fwiw.

No-one truly stands out from the cast, though Sabrina De La Hoz, Margarita Kenéfic, María Mercedes Coroy and Julio Díaz do warrant fai...