In the Flesh: La Llorona (2019)

A Kaqchikel woman (Margarita Kenéfic) runs through a field of withering maize, one child on her hip, another clinging to her hand. Soldiers are coming. We can hear the tramp of their boots, the crass rumble of their voices. She tries to hide as her pursuers draw closer, fear twisting her regal features, the eyes of the children shining in the thin, pale bands of light that fall through the gaps in their shelter. But no, Carmen is only the aging wife of a senile former dictator, lying alone in bed in her own cold piss. Again and again the dream torments her. The soldiers take the children. They drag Carmen into the field as a village burns in the background. The dream grows like a tumor, devouring Carmen’s waking life as the rich, self-obsessed beneficiary of her husband’s acquisitive brutality. Her petty jealousies fall away. The spiteful, racist outbursts stemming from her repressed knowledge that her husband, General Enrique Monteverde (Julio Díaz), is guilty of frankly incomprehensibly evil crimes. Genocide. Mass rape. Theft of people and history on a scale that beggars the imagination. 

Director Jayro Bustamante communicates both the stupid, piglike cruelty of Monteverde and the immense stress his trial and the surrounding protests bring down on his family with masterful command of tone. We spend much of the film shut up in claustrophobic spaces while the voices of protestors swell outside, breaking over characters and viewers alike with relentless force. The desaturated but high-contrast color palette heightens the sense of siege, trapping us in a world drained of sensuality in stark opposition to the vibrant cultural dress of the Mayan protestors, witnesses, and victims of genocide. The colorless Monteverde household is a dead place, a desolate place. Even Carmen and Enrique themselves are nearly devoid of pigment, blending in with their own neutral decor. It’s as though they’ve been bleached from within by their squalid inner lives, as though Enrique’s rutting lust for Mayan women, not just to rape and violate their bodies, but to annihilate their world, has gone to work on his ravaged body as age saps his strength and Uruguay’s political tides turn against him.

Carmen’s dreams, of course, are not her own, but those of hauntingly beautiful maid and nanny Alma (María Mercedes Coroy, the titular spirit of lament who comes to punish the Monteverde family. It’s Carmen’s hands that end Enrique’s life as her own small, cold reality collapses into Alma’s bottomless loss like a glacier calving into the sea, her own ugly little payment toward the dictator’s unimaginable debt to those he and his army slaughtered. The dead themselves are ever-present throughout the film. They wait behind the exquisite veils of their surviving countrymen. They lurk among the faces of the protestors, their dark eyes shining with otherworldly judgment. In the final act they come into the yard of the Monteverde estate, faceless shadows standing mute in crowds. Denial and physical separation fall away. There is no escape from complicity. Even the understated, downbeat ending is a judgment, a lament for the dead and a sentence passed on their killers.