La Llorona (2019): or, Horror, Genocide, and Feminism

La Llorona is an excellent film on all counts. It won numerous awards in the year of its release, as well as a large number of citations from Film Critic associations. There are many reasons for the laurels this film has received: the direction is great, the acting is uniformly excellent, the script is solid, the sound design is haunting, the visuals and cinematography are beautiful. But undoubtedly, the biggest factor in how strongly positive people’s responses to this film have been is its storyline, and its relationship to real, horrific, recent human history.

As you may or may not know, Guatemala underwent a severe genocide in the late twentieth century. Between 1980 and 1983, the Guatemalan army obliterated over 600 indigenous villages, disappeared hundreds of thousands of people, and displaced approximately 1.5 million others. Many fled to Mexico; many others fled to the United States. Years later, in 1999, the Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH) found that the Guatemalan government had deliberately pursued a policy of genocide against the Maya, focusing on four distinct ethnic groups, one of which was the Ixil people, who are centrally featured in La Llorona, along with the Kaqchikel people.

The film is an only barely fictionalized grappling with that horrific, brutal history of violence.

At the beginning of the film, we witness a trial. A dictator, General Enrique Monteverde, has been brought up on charges of genocide against the indigenous Maya peoples of Guatemala. Enrique Monteverde is based on the real-life dictator and genocidal maniac, Efrain Ríos Montt.

In the trial, we hear horrifying, brutal, heart-rending testimony from a veiled Ixil Mayan woman; she delivers her testimony not in Spanish, but in Mayan, and she needs a translator to mediate her testimony into Spanish for the courtroom. She describes mass rapes and mass murders of indigenous people in Guatemala by Monteverde’s troops. She is an older woman, with a warm, soft voice. The veil over her face is blue with gold embroidery; she’s very beautiful, and very dignified. It’s excruciating to hear her soft voice, to see her beautiful garments, and to also hear her translator’s words spelling out the atrocities of what has been done to her. All the indigenous women in the courtroom are similarly attired. Apart from the indigenous women who have come to testify, the courtroom is packed to the gills with reporters, Monteverde’s family and staff, and onlookers, most of whom appear to be on the side of the indigenous litigants. The other veiled indigenous women in the room have already testified—we learn that the woman whose testimony we heard was witness number 82. So, 81 indigenous women before her had already testified about similar atrocities. The scale is horrific; I cried the whole way through this opening scene.

When Monteverde himself takes the stand, he epitomizes the dessicated, decrepit, self-deluded patriarchy. He insists that he is innocent, saying there was no genocide. He appears confused, but not afraid, as though he can’t process what’s going on around him—we already know, by this point, that he’s suffering from some degree of dementia. But it’s not just that. It’s also that he cannot bring himself to accept responsibility for the deaths and rapes of countless thousands of people, because, in his heart, he doesn’t think it was a crime. He doesn’t really see indigenous people as people, so he’s genuinely confused about the reason for his trial. He asserts with stunning bluster that all he ever did, he did for the unity of Guatemala—and he appears to believe it—his face tilted up in a posture of defiance and self-justification.

Too bad for you, Enrique: the judge—who is female—isn’t having your rah-rah nationalist-patriarchy-forever nonsense. She hands down her verdict. Monteverde is guilty of genocide. The courtroom erupts into celebration, except, of course, for Monteverde and his family. I found myself crying again during this verdict, in surprise and relief that the court system did something right, and that these beautiful, tormented, long-silenced Maya witnesses and survivors were truly being heard, heeded, and honored.

But of course, this film is a horror movie, based on a horror reality. So things are bound to get worse.

A higher court almost immediately overturns the verdict, saying that it can’t be proven that there was a deliberate genocide. That’s the thing about women’s testimonies, the higher level court seems to say, they aren’t realy facts. And the thing about disappeared people, of course, is that they can’t testify for themselves.

The people of the city break into rioting and protest—it’s worth noting that Guatemala is historically a majority indigenous country, even in the modern day, so most of the population would have a very good reason to take this appellate overturning of the initial ruling very personally. The Monteverde family compound is surrounded by protesters, some of them throwing rocks, missing person posters, or packets of red paint at the Monteverdes. When the camera pans over the crowd, many of the people there appear to be of indigenous heritage. Some of them look eerily like faces of The Disappeared in the posters that keep getting thrown onto the Monteverde’s lawns. It’s a tense time for the Monteverde family, and they bear it like the patrician Spanish colonizers that they are: complaining bitterly about the injustices they face, worrying about staffing their mansion with servants, wanting the police to shut down the rebels more effectively, wanting to boost their household security detail.

But life inside the compound must go on, and the family has lost almost their entire servant staff—all of whom were indigenous Maya—so they are compelled to hire someone new.

A young, beautiful Maya woman named Alma appears at their door. (Alma, of course, means “soul”—hang onto that.) She barely talks to anyone, except Monteverde’s granddaughter, Sara. Alma loves water—bathing, swimming—and water mysteriously seems to appear whenever she is present. Faucets turn on as she walks by. When she bathes, the water overflows into other rooms. Alma is preoccupied with teaching Sara how to hold her breath underwater for a long time, and tells Sara that she had two children—a boy and a girl—who died.

So, if you know the folkloric tradition around la Llorona, and if you have retained the title of the film in your mind, by this time you know who Alma is, and why she’s there. La Llorona—the weeping woman—is a folkloric traditional figure among Central and South American peoples. In that tradition, la Llorona is a lonely, abandoned woman, who wanders around, forever grieving the loss of her children. (I’ll get into a little more detail in a minute.) So, we know that Alma is la Llorona. Her children were slaughtered by Monteverde and his goons, and she has come for revenge.

But the mechanism by which the film delivers that revenge is super awesome. Alma does not outright attack Monteverde. Instead, she invades Monteverde’s steely wife Carmen’s dreams. During the film’s climax, every night, Carmen has ultra vivid, sensory nightmares in which she—although still in her aged, Spanish-ancestry body—fuses psychically with Alma herself. She desperately tries to help her two small children escape from the violence of Monteverde’s genocidal violence from years before, but cannot. She crouches in a field and urinates from sheer panic; upon waking, Carmen finds that she has, in fact, wet herself in her bed. Carmen’s dreams plague her—they seem so real.

In the final scene of La Llorona, hundreds of angry Maya—the spirits of the murdered, raped, and disappeared—are massing outside the Monteverde home. Panicked, the Monteverdes hold a séance. They beg for mercy and protection from the spirits of the genocide victims, because it’s become clear that’s what’s going on. But while this happens, Carmen again becomes possessed by la Llorona. She has a waking vision of the genocide. Carmen, her long white hair streaming behind her while she wears her nightgown, is caught by soldiers, along with her children, and dragged by the hair to a river. On the way, she passes by corpses and women waiting to be shot. She has to watch her two children be tortured, threatened, and drowned by soldiers in front of her.

A man’s voice interrogates her in Spanish all the while, but she—Carmen—can only speak and understand Maya in this vision. She says, in Maya, “I don’t understand what you’re saying.” She can’t, therefore, satisfy the questions he’s asking. She can’t protect her children; he can’t understand her pleas for clemency or her claims that she has nothing to do with the insurgency he thinks he’s fighting. She screams in agony as her children are forced under the murky water a final time. Then, she looks up at her interrogator’s face, and sees that is none other than Monteverde, her own husband. He shoots her point blank in the head, and she sees Alma’s body fall away from her. Shocked and horrified, Carmen is in a rage now, and this time she fights back. She grabs Monteverde by the throat and chokes him to death. And it turns out that in real life, she’s choking Monteverde to death as well, on her living room floor, with neither her daughter nor granddaughter, nor their servant Valeriana stopping her. Carmen comes back to herself. Monteverde is dead.

The spirits of the past can retreat; they feel avenged. La Llorona has done her work, by penetrating into the house, penetrating into the mind of the lady of the house, and turning her into a weapon of justice against the dry, withered, evil patriarch who has sanctioned the rape, slaughter, and disappearance of countless indigenous Guatemalans.

The Guatemalan genocide should be much, much more in the American public consciousness than it is. Our government did a lot to shore up and arm the government that put to death hundreds of thousands of completely innocent human beings. I’ve been reading a magnificent and absolutely harrowing book about this for the last month or so now, called Everyone Who is Gone is Here. It’s taking me a long time, because it’s just so horrific. It’s an in-depth exploration of the dictatorships in both Guatemala and El Salvador during the 1980s and beyond, as well as of the United States’ role both in facilitating the crimes against humanity that took place there and in turning a blind eye on refugees from those situations. The book centrally follows one particular El Salvadorean doctor, who inadvertently found himself on the wrong side of the army one day. He was imprisoned without trial and brutally tortured for weeks: his leg was broken in an open fracture, but he was left in a dark cell to rot, so that his leg wound became infested with maggots. He’s starved and dehydrated, and then his captors pull him out and put him into a coffin, to be buried alive in an unmarked grave. Miraculously, because this man has an uncle with military connections, he is rescued at the last possible moment, pulled from the coffin—weak, emaciated, hallucinating, and broken—by his uncle.

Now, imagine a scenario in which the victim wasn’t of European ancestry, and didn’t have an uncle in a position powerful enough to intervene. Imagine a scenario in which there was no one who could find you, and no one who had security clearance high enough to come lift you out of the coffin you were buried in. Imagine a scenario in which the victims don’t even speak the same language as their captors, abusers, rapists, torturers, and murderers. My friends, that was the situation that faced native people in Guatemala in the 1980s. That was the situation that La Llorona narrativized and rendered into film.

And that is part of why it’s so important that the spirit of revenge in this film is la Llorona: weeping is a form of communication that transcends language. It is a universal form of communication that expresses grief, loss, outrage, powerlessness, humiliation. La Llorona can make herself understood to anyone.

But I think the most interesting intervention that the film makes into the folkloric tradition surrounding la Llorona is this. In the lore about the weeping woman, it’s usually said that she drowned her own children, with some traditions asserting that she had been abandoned by her lover or husband just prior. (Yes, strong resonances with Medea.) But, filled with regret, she weeps ever after for her children.

Now, in the film La Llorona, as we know, Alma’s children were not drowned by her, but by Monteverde. And Alma said that her children’s father was gone, but had not abandoned her—in the film, the implication is that he was one of the disappeared. So the movie shifts the agency of violence decisively off of the shoulders of the weeping woman or her lover, and onto the shoulders of the tyrannical government. On top of that, whereas the folkloric Llorona spends eternity weeping, disempowered and alone, the filmic Llorona—her undead soul embodied as the revenant Alma—becomes an agent of vengeance, striking back at the men who killed her and her family.

So, La Llorona is not only a horror films that does serious political work to raise awareness about a horrific recent genocide, but it’s also a horror film that creates a badass spirit of empowered vengeance in the place of a spirit of abandonment and endless mourning.[i] If you can get yourself to stop pretending the past is over, if you can make it so that other people can feel the past now, as an ongoing element of the present, rather than something we can turn away from or disavow, you can get that past—however horrible—to serve some purpose in the present.

I am reminded of the last line of Toni Morrison’s beautiful, perfect novel Song of Solomon, in which “air” is a physical manifestation of the ongoingness of history, and the unkillability of the past: “if you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.”

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[i] This move, of reimagining la Llorona as an empowered agent, rather than an abandoned victim who sorrows alone forever, is not unique to this film. It appears somewhat frequently in contemporary Latin American feminist literature, getting a particularly interesting (and canonical) formulation in Gloria Anzaldua’s brilliant and groundbreaking book Borderlands/La Frontera (1987).

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