La Llorona: Turning Horror into Light

What do Guatemalans do now with that legacy—what do they owe to it? What are they to do with these persistent questions about justice and historical memory, and about how to do justice to memory? Justice can be fought for in the courts, but the fight can be unjustly lost there. It can be found in individual hearts and understandings, in families, even in some communities, when a range of sacred, hard, courageous, and generous paths are followed. It can also be found, if in less direct ways, through the empathy and catharsis that art sometimes makes possible. A movie like La Llorona can explore questions of justice through its visual and dramatic storytelling, and it can also enact and exemplify justice in its very making, in the forming of a community in order to make it. La Llorona, so mesmerizing and bewitching, is a film that blows my mind, but so does the story of how it was created.

When he was mulling over how to make a film about Guatemala’s recent past, Bustamante says, he realized he was familiar with the experiences of war victims—survivors with their vivid memories, traumas, and silence; children of the disappeared and murdered; and so on. But he’d never really considered what it was like to be a victimizer, one of the officers who, for example, ordered soldiers to murder children by swinging them by the legs and smashing their heads open against trees, or by drowning them in rivers while their mothers were made to watch. What was it like to be General Ríos Montt himself, aware that he was responsible for so much of it? “I know they’re always saying that there was no genocide and that they didn’t do anything wrong,” Bustamante told me. “But they can’t be like that all the time; they know what they did. Do they drop that pretense when they’re alone at home?”

When Bustamante first met with Telón and his other Kaqchikel Maya lead, María Mercedes Coroy, about La Llorona, he says, he apologized for offering them the clichéd roles of housemaids. But, as Telón insisted to him, the exploitation that is such an overwhelming fact of life for so many Guatemalan Maya women and girls shouldn’t be ignored. Bustamante studied a Guatemalan pamphlet on how to mold someone into the perfect household servant that explained that domestic workers should be so unobtrusive as to seem to be unable to see or feel. The director understood: “They’re supposed to be like ghosts.”

The story needed the dark monster of the general to be opposed by another monster, one representing light. But when Bustamante looked for female figures of horror “with dignity,” he discovered “that there aren’t any: they’re all really bad women”—all expressions of cultural misogyny. That includes the common Latin American folk figure of La Llorona: a woman with long hair, robed in white, who comes out at night, wailing in remorse over her children, whom she drowned in a river before drowning herself, and whom she seeks to replace by stealing the children of others. She also lures lustful men to follow her into madness or death. Pre-Hispanic versions of La Llorona are more benign; it was the Spanish colonists who transformed her into a malevolent figure. Even now, in some Mexican villages, traces of a sympathetic La Llorona exist—leave a baby’s dirty clothes out and she’ll wash them. Bustamante combined some of those gentler roots with elements of the popular myth for his La Llorona.

Early in the film, the sounds of distant wailing and murmuring water wake the general late at night, luring him into his first act of violence in La Llorona, which causes his family to suspect that his mind is slipping. The Maya servants, frightened by the supernatural stirrings, quit, except for Valeriana, who arrived at the house with the general decades earlier and is rumored to be his illegitimate daughter. She’s the classic indio permitido—faithful to the family for life, deluding herself that her nearly enslaved condition is mutual love. The next day—after making her way through the crowd of protesters that has gathered outside the general’s house and that keeps up a steady racket of Maya drums, wind instruments, and chanted slogans—a beautiful young Kaqchikel woman (Coroy) turns up, apparently looking for work as a maid.

This is Alma, a mother of two deceased children by day and La Llorona by night. Her presence will prove to be by turns enrapturing, terrifying (especially for the general and his wife), and transformative. The general will be lured further into madness, his depraved, racist, and predatory nature exposed. Alma/Llorona is an avenging ghost who comes to open the eyes of the women in the family. She takes possession of Carmen in dreams at night, carrying the elderly woman away to the time and place of her husband’s crimes, forcing her to experience, with harrowing vividness, what he and his soldiers did to Alma and her children. Natalia confronts the truth, too, as Alma forms a nurturing, confiding relationship with young Sara. Before their eyes, the faces of the disappeared gather beneath their window, on posters held by the protesters: the living dead, demanding to be seen, demanding justice.

For his three features to date, Bustamante has relied heavily on actors who have no professional training. Thousands turn up for his casting calls, and when he has assembled a cast, which can number in the hundreds, he and his team train them at their own academia—a process that, in La Llorona’s case, lasted five months. Bustamante discovered Coroy when casting for his 2015 movie Ixcanul. There were at least five other candidates who seemed like more natural performers, but he saw that “María Mercedes’s eyes could swallow the screen.” She was timid, but he sensed an incredible strength of character in her too. Coroy brought that combination of traits to her performance in that film as María, a young Maya woman who has been promised to the mestizo capataz of the coffee plantation where she lives and works.

For her part in La Llorona, Coroy drew on her own grandmother’s memories of being young during the war. Her grandmother was beautiful, and her parents constantly worried that she would be abducted and raped; whenever either soldiers or guerrillas approached their village, they would wrap her in a petate, a mat of woven plant fibers, and hide her under the house alone for hours. Coroy’s grandmother had to learn to weep in silence. When Coroy was a little girl herself, the older woman would tell her, “You will never have to weep in silence.” Coroy used what her grandmother had endured in her performance as the silent, seemingly obedient Alma, who serves in the home of the man responsible for the massacre in which her own two children were drowned. Her grave, watchful demeanor, her at times nearly childlike gentleness, and her eerie patience mask the other world that goes on living inside of her—one of awful loss, terror, grief, of a yearning for vengeance but even more for the lightning-like light of justice, which she has the ability to transmit to those around her. It’s almost miraculous, the way we see that churning inner life expressed through its effect on others, while Coroy maintains her outer poise and calm.