Archive: Author: Kurt Brueckner

Scare Me (2020)

Posted on by Kurt Brueckner

The year 1816 is often recalled as Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death.  Fallout from the eruption of the Tambora Volcano in Indonesia a year earlier led to freezing temperatures and disastrous weather patterns. In June of this “year without summer”, heavy rains near Lake Geneva drove a small group of vacationers to seek refuge within Villa Diodati. Comprising this group was Lord Byron, renter of the villa, as well as John Polidori, his personal physician, and a couple on holiday who were staying nearby – Percy Shelley and his future wife, Mary Godwin. Stuck inside, they whiled away their time reading spooky stories…until Percy came up with a capital idea. The resulting competition to produce the best ghost story, of course, is stuff of horror legend. Young Mary Godwin penned the first draft of Frankenstein, effectively inventing science fiction, and John Polidori wrote The Vampyre, consolidating vampire lore into the modern romantic vampire genre. Writer, director and star Josh Ruben channels that same creative glee and celebration of terror in his film Scare Me.

Fred Banks is a writer. Well, to be more exact, he’s a copywriter looking to perform a mid-career pivot to long form prose. He postures as a novelist, though. After all, he just flew clear across the country, from LA to the Catskills, to retreat to a remote cabin and write the next great American horror novel. The trouble is, all he’s got is a derivative idea for a werewolf revenge story and a crippling case of writer’s block. The next morning, whilst on a run, hoping get the creative juices flowing, Fred encounters another jogger. To his delight, he finds that not only is she staying at a cabin in the same snowy enclave as he, but she is also a horror novelist! His newly met neighbor, Fanny, has published Venus, a bestselling smash hit.  Fred is at first excited to have met a fellow writer, but falters when she asks if he’s written anything she may have read. He chokes out that he “had a few things in development”, and Fanny immediately surmises aloud that “yours is a no.” Fanny, like the viewer, quickly gathers that he is simply playing author, and shows no compunction reminding him of that, or quickly extracting herself from the conversation. And why should she? He’s just a weird wannabe that she ran into on a lonely country road. However, when the weather takes a turn that evening, and the driving snow knocks out the power, Fanny calls on this rookie writer with a simple request: “scare me”. And, like an echo of 1816, the duo launch into an epic night of duelling campfire tales. Only, unlike their spiritual predecessors, these two are unknown quantities, and what’s scarier than being snowed in and isolated with a complete stranger?

While lingering doubts about the wisdom of sequestering with a stranger drive the framing narrative and inject the film with a nagging sense of tension, Scare Me isn’t very scary. In fact, it is in large part a comedic dive into our love for, and the creation of, scary stories. The set-up is straightforward; Fred and Fanny are stuck in his cabin, and we watch as the narratives they share unfold right there. As they work, the creators stumble, interrupt, get distracted, and lose their train of thought. Most of the stories the colleagues share are not particularly spooky to begin with, and even with the scarier ones, they invariably lose momentum and tension when one of the writers interrupts to offer notes or a ‘yes and’.  As counterbalance to the editorial interruptions, Ruben also recognizes a tale well told: as a story catches fire, elements are emphasized with sound effects. Just as the atmosphere from a good horror yarn can spread beyond the television, so too do we watch as particularly powerful bits of stories are made manifest in Fred’s cabin. As terror builds, low growls issue from the darkness, gunshots echo out, or wheels squeak slowly across the wooden floors overhead. So while Scare Me trades-in much of the dread associated with horror stories, it is a pleasure to watch them play out in real time.

As our battling storytellers, Josh Ruben and Aya Cash are both fantastic, and they deliver their narratives with verve. Ruben’s Fred commits wholeheartedly to his characters, hissing, growling and shrieking, all the while contorting his face in exaggerated masks of emotion. His full-body pantomime imbues his characters with life – and a humor that reflects the joy of storytelling. Fanny is the perfect foil to Fred; she is a better storyteller and an exacting editor. Her stories are more thought out, and Cash’s own sound effects and timing bring the scares to heights Fred just can’t reach.  Furthermore, Cash brings her biting wit to a torrent of constructive criticism wrapped in a solid streak of snark. In provoking Fred she is harsh – but never mean – and hurls her heckles with spot-on timing. Best of all, Fanny’s criticisms bring to the film a self-awareness that acknowledges horror tropes but still appreciates a spooky yarn. Here, the writing leans right up against the fourth wall: Fanny could just as easily be sitting on our couch as she sits on Fred’s. The outcome is a clever, at times zany, metanarrative investigation of what makes a good scary story. 

Through all this fun, however, it is easy to forget that Scare Me still purports to be a horror film. On one level, it is: the inherent tension in the relationship between protagonists, and the circumstances that brought them together, lurks just off screen. Fred is creeping into middle age, frustrated by an unexceptional career, and it clearly rankles that Fanny is an accomplished writer and a successful, confident young woman.

This dynamic rears up between stories and colors the peers’ interjections just enough to leave a persistent concern. Power, in its various incarnations, shifts fluidly between the characters over the course of the evening and culminates in an intelligent third act. Unfortunately, balancing the tension of the framing narrative with the sheer joy of storytelling proves to be a rather difficult task, and is one point where Scare Me struggles. Even though Ruben’s script does good accounting and his finale cleverly integrates the themes of Scare Me, it still feels tonally mismatched with the jubilant heights of its leads’ jointly improvised tales. The exuberance of the authors’ storytelling just eclipses everything else. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though. In spite of its uneven tone, Scare Me is a smartly crafted film that wholeheartedly embraces the art of storytelling.  And although the stories from this Catskills cabin might not rival those born of Villa Diodati, it’s a rare pleasure to glimpse the creative process along with the final product. 

Spiral (2019)

Posted on by Kurt Brueckner

Malik (Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman) is having an argument over the phone.  His conversant assures him, “The world’s a different place.  It’s not like it was back then.” Malik disagrees vehemently: “The world is exactly the same place it was back then. People don’t change, Liam. They just get better at hiding how they feel.” Indeed. Director Kurtis David Harder’s Spiral is an exceptional piece of social horror that lives out its protagonist’s words. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

The film opens in 1983, on a young, interracial gay couple making out in the back of a car. Quick cuts reveal headlights approaching, then one teen on the ground, bloodied, as the other screams for help, and then it’s 1995, and we meet Malik, owner of the flashback. He’s in the car with his partner, Aaron (Ari Cohen), and Aaron’s teenage daughter, Kayla (Jennifer Laporte), as they drive to their new home in Rusty Creek. Aaron has been yearning for a change of pace from city life, but judging by Malik’s flashback, he is more wary.  He knows what evil may lurk behind the bucolic scenery of the countryside.

Danger, however, doesn’t always lurk or skulk. Homophobia is rampant in the United States, and writers Colin Minihan and John Poliquin carefully cultivate that national temperature as a backdrop to the events of Spiral.  TV interviews with conservative thinkers play in the background, declaring that the traditional family unit is everything, and so-called scientists tout gay conversion therapies.  At one point, Pat Buchanan’s 1992 “Culture War” speech issues from a car radio like a seeping poison. In it, he rails against homosexual rights, and warns, “It is not the kind of change America needs. It is not the kind of change America wants. And it is not the kind of change we can abide in a nation that we still call God’s country.” 

Malik’s new home of Rusty Creek may well be the ‘God’s country’ of Buchanan’s speech. Tiffany, a chipper neighbor, pops over to offer a houseplant to welcome the new arrivals after she sees their “gardener working”. Of course, they don’t have a gardener; she has mistaken Malik for the help. When Aaron corrects her and introduces Malik as his partner, Tiffany momentarily stumbles before chirping, “Wow. That’s so exciting, we don’t have any of you in town.” In spite of her awful introduction, Tiffany seems to actually be pretty warm and accepting. She and her jovial heartlander husband, Marshal, are welcoming neighbors. They have drinks with Malik and Aaron at a party. They invite the couple over for dinner.  They assert that “love is all that matters”. Marshal suggests that bigots are “assholes”. Has the world started to change? Or have people, like Tiffany and Marshal, just gotten better at hiding how they feel?  

Unfortunately, Malik knows that “choosing to live your life loud and proud is about the bravest thing you can do in this world”. He understands how dangerous it is to be Black and gay in America, and even with the best intentions to make his new life work, he knows that he doesn’t have the luxury to ease into his surroundings without a healthy distrust. His worry, of course, is merited. People seem to be watching him; not just staring at the ‘other’, but actually keeping tabs on him.  And someone broke into his house to spray-paint the word ‘faggot’ across his living room wall. Malik has every right to be concerned about his neighbors’ prejudices. And to make matters worse, he accidentally witnesses many of them performing a strange ritual in the house across the way…

By combining the terror of mysterious rituals with the horror of homophobia, Minihan and Poliquin have blended social horror and folk horror to fantastic effect. Much of folk horror’s appeal stems from the otherness of the rural community our protagonists are thrust into. In Spiral, they have seized on that theme and turned it on its head. The insular and foreign communities of folk horror films like The Wicker Man or Midsommar are replaced by a small-town hospitality that is so recognizable. The horror of being an outsider instead derives from a national climate of hostility and the contempt that hides just behind the smiles of one’s neighbors. As Malik, Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman gives a standout performance as that outsider. He is a loving partner and father, and supremely likable, endearingly embracing Kayla as “booger” throughout the film. Still, he is haunted by his past. The trauma of his youth echoes to his present in many ways throughout the film, but none perhaps so tragic as how it has altered his worldview. He knows that the world has not changed, and he tries to protect his loved ones from that awful truth, beset by horrors both and mundane and otherworldly. 

Although utilizing intolerance is a natural and frightening way to update the closed communities of folk horror, there are moments where the parallel threats of homophobia and the neighborhood’s more supernatural machinations seem to be thematically at odds with one another. Whenever rituals figure into a story, there is a tacit understanding between viewer and filmmaker that there is a logic to the process, and there were times in Spiral where competition between the dual horror narratives undercut that logic. The filmmakers certainly have a compelling story to tell; one with meaningful things to say, but there are times where it feels like they overreached, opted for a little more horror, and threw off their accounting.  Nonetheless, Spiral is a great, tense thriller, elevated by a fantastic performance from Bowyer-Chapman and a message that is still sadly, painfully timely. Twenty-five years on, it often feels like the “world is the same place it was back then”. Still, some things have changed – the advent of social horror has expanded genre films’ reach as allegory for societal ills, and Spiral is a both powerhouse horror film and a welcome change.

Spiral released on the 17th September 2020 (UK).

Swallow (2019)

Posted on by Kurt Brueckner

Magpies are notorious for their willingness to eat almost anything.  In fact, it is due to this habit that they lend their Latin name, picave, to the psychological condition known as pica. Listed in the DSM-V as an eating disorder wherein one persistently eats non-nutritive, non-food substances, pica is basically the formal diagnosis for someone who eats things that are not meant to be eaten. The exact cause of pica is still unknown, but it does have a higher incidence in pregnant women. A commonly held theory to explain its cause is that it is related to a nutritional deficiency. This explanation has an appealing common-sense logic to it: one can draw a pretty clear line from cause to effect. Your body is crying out for some kind of vitamin or mineral that the baby needs; yet somewhere, the message gets scrambled, resulting in an urge to consume non-nutritive items. Pica is also linked to a variety of stressors, and is often associated with a need for comfort. Regardless of its cause, it’s a disease that packs a seriously visceral impact; there is something so unsettling about the trespass of foreign bodies into yours. 

In Swallow, writer-director Carlo Mirabella-Davis explores this fascinating and unnerving affliction with a humanity that belies its billing as a psychological thriller. It would probably be better described as a psychological drama, as it lacks the lurking dangers or imminent threats that hallmark thrillers. Instead, the film is permeated by a sense of unease as you get to know Hunter (Haley Bennett) and come to fully appreciate the crushing weight of her predicament.  

Hunter is a young bride-to-be, and her fiancé, Richie Conrad (Austin Stowell), a moneyed businessman from a wealthy family. They’ve just moved into a marvellous new home, purchased by Richie’s parents, and are all set to start a wonderful life together. At a sumptuous feast that appears to double as a board meeting, Richie’s father, the CEO of a private enterprise, makes him the “youngest managing director in the history of the company”. Hunter looks on lovingly as Richie accepts the promotion and assures the assembled titans that he “couldn’t have done any of this without [his] beautiful bride.”  Mirabella-Davis, however, tells a different story: we watch as Hunter aimlessly tidies their riverside mansion, cooks meals, and whiles away the hours in her gilded prison. She is a homemaker, not a partner. And no matter how many times she tries to convince herself and the world at large that she’s happy, it feels hollow. Hunter has made a Faustian bargain which she sums up quite well in a painful conversation with her mother-in-law, Katherine: “I’m just real grateful for Richie and you guys for providing me some solid ground to stand on”. The terms of this bargain, however, become unacceptable after she finds out that she’s pregnant with “the future CEO” of the company.  At the celebratory dinner, Kevin, her father-in-law, egregiously silences her, and no one seems to notice or care. So, in a moment of defiance, she crunches through the ice in her glass, stopping the conversation cold. It’s liberating, but this power of self-determination is fleeting, so she starts to eat other things, too.

The more her freedom diminishes, the more her appetite expands, and the drama of Swallow slowly builds as Hunter’s hunger grows. Again, Swallow is not, strictly speaking, a thriller, but her descent is a stressful one.  Her in-laws are terrible. David Rasche imbues Kevin Conrad with icy indifference, and his wife Katherine, played chillingly by Elizabeth Marvel, oozes disdain and scepticism. Hunter’s every interaction with them is horrifying in their blasé attitude of disrespect. Her moments of pica, too, will make you squirm. Excellent sound design and Foley amp up the sounds of glass or metal against enamel. And throughout, Haley Bennett brings a wide-eyed naivety and earnest loneliness to Hunter. She is so strikingly out of her depth, struggling with her new family, and clearly in denial regarding the gravity of her situation.

Because the tension swells and fades across discrete scenes of Hunter’s pica, loneliness, and belittling, the film can feel a little directionless in the first act. Rather than ramping up, it layers the different tableaux, as Hunter suffers a thousand little indignities and searches for ways to reclaim her autonomy, until it reaches a fever pitch. Once Hunter’s pica does come to the surface, the film finds more focus as Hunter’s struggle is increasingly defined (for both her and the viewer) as in opposition to the Conrad family.  Additionally, Hunter begins seeing a psychologist, a move that allows Mirabella-Davis to begin parcelling out a backstory that helps to flesh out Hunter’s motivations and clarify a much more powerful narrative arc for her. When these disparate elements finally coalesce, they give way to a taut, yet moving, third act. While its pacing and gentle approach to the subject matter may put off viewers searching for a more exaggerated horror experience, Swallow is a smart, quiet drama that offers a haunting meditation on isolation, autonomy, and fate, presented through the lens of the very real body horror of pica.

The Rental (2020)

Posted on by Kurt Brueckner

The gig economy, specifically ride-booking and vacation rental apps, has turned the social contract of the service industry upside down.  For better or for worse, hailing a ride or renting a place now typically includes a personal flourish that might not be entirely welcome.  Personally, I love when I get into a taxi, and the driver doesn’t bother to hang up their call.   Sure, I appreciate service with a smile, but I’m also not looking for small talk.  When I do end up chatting, it’s pretty harmless and mundane conversation, but on rare occasions, I’ve been shocked to find myself locked in a car with a total stranger who also happens to be a massive bigot.  In fact, I’d hazard that most people have probably started a conversation with a driver or host that made them regret their booking. Writers Dave Franco and Joe Swanberg seize on this exact kind of experience to update the hotel stalker subgenre for the Airbnb generation. Norman Bates at least owned and operated a motel; now anyone can invite us into their home, and we go gladly.

Charlie (Dan Stevens) and Mina (Sheila Vand) are young, attractive, and successful.  They just locked down seed funding for their startup, and they book a weekend getaway at a wildly expensive, remote beach house to celebrate. Charlie’s wife, Michelle (Alison Brie), is coming too. And his brother Josh (Jeremy Allen White), a “barely employed Lyft driver” who “got kicked out of college, and served jail time for nearly beating a guy to death outside of his frat house”. He also happens to be Mina’s boyfriend. So the two couples, excited about their weekend, hit the road together.  But they haven’t even reached their rental before experiencing their first pang of doubt about the weekend. It would seem that their host, Taylor, might be racist.  Upon meeting him, he exceeds expectations.  Taylor is not only racist, but also aggressive. Their whole encounter with him is fraught with tension. It’s unsettling, but this is a celebratory weekend and the house is so nice that they quickly forget about him. So too, do we.

Aside from their somewhat disturbing encounter with Taylor, the first act of the film is largely preoccupied with the relationships between its foursome.  Here, the majority of the tension is sexual; the suspense is all derived from secret longings. There is no terror or paranoia. The beautiful, windswept coast and oppressive fog certainly sets a tone, but were it not for the cinematography and score, one could forget that The Rental was a horror film. Rather, it smacks of a mumblecore outing: two couples exploring their romantic entanglements on a weekend getaway.  In fact, Taylor’s unpleasantness could almost be chalked up as one more ugly element in a weekend that seems to be going sour. That is, until they find a hidden camera… 

While the character drama fully supplants any horror in the first part of the film, it is at least not discrete from the rest of the movie. The discovery of the camera precipitates a series of poor choices, which are driven by the relationship complications developed early on. Here, The Rental finally shifts into thriller territory.  However, this is a half measure, as it takes some more time to turn into the full-blown horror promised by the central conceit. The end result is a movie that feels rather disjointed. 

Even with its tight runtime, I suspect that many viewers may find that the thriller and horror elements are too sparse throughout the relationship drama to keep them interested. And once the action does kick off, The Rental seems perplexingly unclear about what it wants to say. If Franco, who also directed, indeed intended to update hotel horror for gig economy getaways, then many elements of the protagonists’ ordeal seem incongruous with that mission. The choices the characters make, once under pressure, vary from stupid to nonsensical, and little of what they do seems to have any thematic relevance to a cautionary tale about the perils of private bookings. 

While it falls short thematically due to an uneven narrative, The Rental is still a pretty enjoyable mumblecore romp.  The character drama is well written and universally delivered with charisma by its likeable cast.  And when he does bring the horror that was promised, Franco still manages to add a fresh twist to the genre. The Rental definitely feels scattered, but it’s a diverting 90 minutes. Think of it as the same weekend being ruined twice—first dramatically through interpersonal breakdown, then horribly, and more permanently.

The Rental is available on-demand through the usual channels now.

Relic (2020)

Posted on by Kurt Brueckner

It is likely that you’ve heard some version of the term “Mind Palace Technique” used in conversation around feats of memory.  Known formally as “The Method of Loci,” it is a memorization technique wherein one memorizes the layout of a building, associates an item with each location in the mental image, and later mentally retrieves each item by “walking” through the structure.  A recent, popular example to point to is the Memory Palace of Benedict Cumberbatch’s titular character from BBC’s Sherlock.  But the strategy dates back to ancient Rome and Greece— we have tried to impose structure on memory and our representation of mind for centuries. In Relic, director and co-writer Natalie Erika James constructs a deteriorating memory palace in physical space, creating a compelling and poignant haunted house story that asks, “If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is a decaying home?”

Edna (Robyn Nevin) is missing. Local police inform her daughter, Kay, over the phone. Kay, in turn, alerts her own, grown, daughter, Sam, and the two of them head to their ancestral abode to help with the search and to keep the home fires burning should Edna return. As Kay and Sam arrive, the house looms up and we get our first hint at the character of its absent inhabitant; this severe edifice postures like the best of haunted houses, large, proud, ageing, and lonely among the encroaching woods. Its interiors suggest further deterioration: clearly once a beautiful home, it is now marred by signs of neglect and confusion. As Kay (Emily Mortimer) tidies up, she finds food left out for a long deceased pet; the camera lingers on rotting fruit. The multitude of Post-It notes, however, is the most telling—the house is wallpapered with reminders to perform simple, daily tasks. And over everything, a creeping mold. Here is Edna’s memory palace made manifest: outwardly proud, but the contents of her home indicate dementia. Her home is metaphor for her ailing mind. The encroaching rot invades the house as it does her psyche.

But there may be an even greater cause for concern: peppered throughout the landscape of a house and mind in decline are indications of a more immediate threat.  Among the innocuous reminders are a few that take a more sinister tone. Sam finds a note imploring the reader, “Don’t Follow It”. Similarly, many doors in the home have seen the addition of new chain locks and dead bolts. Some doors have several.  One in particular even includes an improvised lock utilizing a wooden spoon. Are these acts of paranoia further signs of dementia? Or do they hint at danger from an outside force?  Fantastic set and sound design build on an already unsettling atmosphere until the dilapidated halls ooze dread.  Seething shadows harbor an anthropoid silhouette. Creaking floorboards chorus around distinct knocks, apparently issuing from within the walls.  It would seem that some sort of malignant entity stalks the house and its inhabitants.  Is this incursion into Edna’s palace just further expression of her deteriorating mental state, or could it be the cause of it?

When Edna suddenly returns after three days without explanation, relief at her return is immediately swallowed by the ever-growing tension. She, like the stern facade of her home, tries to project strength, and to a certain extent is successful. In her more lucid stretches, she is whip-smart and fiercely independent. When Kay confronts her about her degrading memory, bringing up the proliferation of Post-Its all over the house, Edna simply remarks, “It’s my house, I can decorate however I want.” Moments like this allude to Edna’s wit and poise. But in spite of these moments, because of these moments, the truth that underscores these interactions is that much more painful. The Post-Its, impervious to her quips, signal that Edna is not the woman she once was, and despite her protestations, she knows it. She slips through different states of acuity, warmly dancing with her granddaughter before lapsing into confusion and anger.  She is self-reliant, then suddenly so frail, painfully small and scared under her covers, insisting her daughter check for monsters beneath her bed. James paints of a striking picture of a family straining to hold together in the face of an unseen and unrelenting foe. The horror is in the family coming to terms with the fact that their loved one is slipping away.

The metaphor here is not subtle, and using horror to outsize the inherent fear in no longer recognizing the person you know and love is not particularly novel. Even so, James has managed to find a new angle to address mental health through constructing a crumbling memory palace.  Utilizing its decaying house impeccably, Relic delivers all the dread of a classic, slow-burning chiller while staying true to its allegory.  To be sure, it is not a traditional film about a haunted habitation.  The focus is on the three women as they struggle to reconcile with their inevitable fate.  Edna’s health worsens, filial relationships are tested, and all the while, menace builds to a third act crescendo that capitalizes on its central metaphor in dizzyingly thrilling fashion. Supernatural or otherwise, dementia is an intergenerational curse, and Relic spins a taut horror yarn that is equal parts heart wrenching and terrifying.

Relic (2020) will be released in the UK on 30th October 2020.

La Llorona (2019)

Posted on by Kurt Brueckner

In case you, like me, have some holes in your world history and were hoping that Don Enrique Monteverde (Julio Diaz) was invented for this film- I’ve got some bad news.  Monteverde is a dead ringer for Guatemalan leader and General José Efraín Rios Montt, who is very real indeed.  Montt led the military government from March 1982 to August 1983, and in 2013 was convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity for his role in the Guatemalan genocide- destroying villages and killing, disappearing, or displacing indigenous Mayan peoples.  The horror in Jayro Bustamante’s La Llorona, is very real, and is first and foremost human horror.

The film begins with the Don and his cabinet subdued— his trial is not going well.  While his ministers fret and his wife prays, Enrique sips his whiskey and coldly remarks to one despondent minister, “Age has turned you into a coward.”  Life at home belies his public coolness.  Enrique wakes to the sounds of a woman crying, grabs a gun, and staggers through his labyrinthine mansion searching for the source of the disruption.  It would seem that age has made Monteverde delirious; dementia is beginning to take hold of the ailing fallen dictator.  The staff, mostly indigenous folk, scared of Enrique, scared of the angry mobs outside his home, quit.  Valeriana, his one loyal servant, stays on.  She even tries to bring in new help from her village.  Only Alma, played with an ethereal quiet by María Mercedes Coroy, answers the call, arriving with little more than a white dress and a deep sadness.  

While her arrival coincides with the General’s conviction being overturned (this is true of the real-life Montt, as well), the situation does not improve in the Monteverde house.  Protestors remain outside, and the family – Enrique, his wife Carmen, his daughter Natalia, and his granddaughter Sara, along with their reduced staff – are effectively prisoners in their own home.  Nerves continue to fray, the general’s health and mental state remain precarious, and something seems off about the new girl.  Could she be the eponymous ghost?

As the story of La Llorona is rooted in oral tradition, the specifics vary, but she is a Latin American iteration of the Lady in White legend.  Typically, her story reads something like this: In life, La Llorona was known as Maria, a beautiful mother of two.  She is jilted by her lover, and in a fit of pain and rage, drowns her children in a river.  Emerging from this fevered moment of insanity, she realizes the gravity of what she has done, and overcome with remorse, kills herself.  Unfortunately, her crimes bar her from entering Heaven, and she is instead doomed to roam the countryside, weeping as she searches for her children.  In fact, her name translates to “The Wailing Woman”, or sometimes just “the Crier”.  In her spectral madness, she is not particularly discerning in her search and will snatch any wandering child she can and drown them.  Parents invoke this boogeyman to discourage their children from staying out late.  Bustamante, however, is preoccupied with an evil that is far greater, and more human.

At first blush, Alma appears to be the embodiment of La Llorona, wearing a white frock and waist-length dark hair.  She has an unhealthy fascination with water, playing a game where she encourages Sara to try to hold her breath for as long as possible.  She even confides in the young girl that her two children are dead.   But Bustamante keeps you guessing.  While scenes will momentarily infuse Alma with menace, they’ll pull back, revealing the otherworldly as mundane.  Remember, she is not the real monster here; Don Enrique is.  In a particularly haunting scene, his monstrousness is laid bare as Mayan-Ixil victims testify to his atrocities.  The general who terrorized the countryside is the true boogeyman. 

Recognizing these depths of human cruelty as the real horror, Bustamante reimagines the legend of La Llorona.  He redistributes the story beats of the titular phantom among his leading characters:  Alma has lost her children, Enrique has innocent blood on his hands, and Carmen (Margarita Kenéfic), wrestles with the guilt over her husband’s actions and her implicit support in standing by him.  It’s actually Carmen’s character arc that drives this story and binds the elements together.  Alma is largely a catalyst, and Enrique, in his rational moments, shows no compunction for what he has done.  Carmen’s internal struggle, on the other hand, highlights the guilt that we associate with La Llorona, and it is her reckoning that guides the narrative.  Kenéfic’s depiction of a woman grappling with the ramifications of her choices grounds the film and strengthens its theme of moral obligation.

Interestingly, this may not be La Llorona’s first brush with genocide.  Some identify her origins with the story of La Malinche, an indigenous Nahua woman taken as an interpreter and mistress by Hernán Cortés.  Her role as an advisor to his conquistadors was integral in their conquest of the Aztec empire.  In this conception, La Llorona’s crime against her children derives from La Malinche’s betrayal of her people.  Carmen’s predicament and tacit approval of her husband’s tactics echoes the role of La Malinche, and further develops the question of culpability.

Having grown up in a Chicano neighborhood in Southern California, I spent my childhood sprinting home at nightfall to avoid the clutching grasp of La Llorona.  I know the legend all too well, and, perhaps to its detriment, the film assumes that familiarity.  Bustamante and co-writer Lisandro Sanchez have certainly crafted a powerful psychological thriller, but in repurposing the folklore, they ultimately have to rely more heavily on the viewer’s knowledge and fear of the Weeping Woman.  As with many movies that seek to blend human horror with the supernatural, it is a balancing act, and scare-oriented genre fans may be disappointed by a decided lack of supernatural horror throughout much of the film.  Struggles with balance rear up briefly in pacing as well.  For a film that carefully charts the collapse of a family and excels in building paranoia through deliberate pacing, the conclusion feels a little rushed.  La Llorona delivers a strong ending, but in stark contrast to the very intentional flow of the film, it feels a bit frenetic as it tries to tie everything up.

Still, the result is a tense exploration of guilt and sanity.  Can we escape the ghosts of our past?  Can a debt this unimaginable be repaid?  And who should pay?  By steeping the film in the Llorona myth but focusing on the moral burden and deterioration of the Monteverde family, Bustamante ensures that the horror in La Llorona derives from the sins of the father, spinning a campfire tale for children into a fantastic, slow-burning, drama with a supernatural bent.