La Llorona

8/30/2022

"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 aren’t 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 Guatemalan army while an interpreter translates her w

2/22/2025

<em>'La Llorona'</em> 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 <em>'The Curse of La Llorona'</em> (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 fair praise. If we're talking merit

10/19/2025

Quite the Haunting introduction to the film. This telling of the story is horrific and quite heartbreaking, as any who watch will have to hear to believe. 1st Guatemalan telling for me and its story is beyond distressing, I can only imagine the Horror to come into play soon. The pain of guilt or pure hysteria, either are giving off such a horrifically haunting vibe. Either Madness has set in or the mystical is starting to appear, things are finally starting to come to light possibly. Fantastic story of Pain and Suffering

11/23/2025

Set as Guatemala emerges from a period of military dictatorship, we are taken to the palatial home of ailing, retired and complicit general “Enrique” (Julio Diaz). He has been convicted then cleared of being atop a pyramid of abuse, murder and corruption but his associates are determined to keep him further from the hands of the courts and the people. If he falls, so do many of them. His trial has attracted a great deal of public attention, and so his frequent visits to court - complete with sympathy inducing oxygen cylinder - have led to angry crowds outside a home that relies on police protection to keep secure. What begins to emerge, though, is a threat that is way more ethereal than the baying mob. To be honest, this element is disappointingly underplayed but as the tensions mount, we