We’re back on the road for another stop on the Letterboxd Map! This week we’re heading to Guatemala, where folklore and political horror collide in a way you don’t see every day. The film is… La Llorona (2019).
Title: La Llorona
Director: Jayro Bustamante
Released: July 25, 2019 (Theatrical – South Korea)
Runtime: 1 hour 37 minutes
Enrique Monteverde (Julio Díaz) is a retired Guatemalan general with a past that refuses to stay buried. After being acquitted of genocide on a legal technicality, he returns home to a mansion surrounded nightly by protesters demanding justice.
Inside the house, the atmosphere begins to shift.
Staff members leave without much explanation. The nights grow restless. Alma (María Mercedes Coroy) arrives as a new maid and quickly becomes the only person Monteverde’s wife, Carmen (Margarita Kenéfic), seems willing to trust.
As Monteverde’s sense of control begins to slip, the film tightens its focus on that unraveling. Whether what’s happening inside the house is real starts to matter less than what it represents.
So what exactly is happening within those walls?
What Jayro Bustamante does with La Llorona is something quietly striking. This is not a horror film for us. We’re not the ones being haunted here. Monteverde is, and that distinction shapes everything that follows. Rather than building toward traditional scares, Bustamante is far more interested in the deteriorating interior world of a man living in the shrinking space between his crimes and whatever may be coming for him.
The film is a slow burn. If you’re expecting something immediate or overtly intense, it may take some time to settle into its rhythm. But once it does, the approach pays off. The tension builds through long silences, the steady hum of the crowd outside the gates, and a camera that lingers just long enough to create unease. Director of Photography Nicolás Wong keeps each frame controlled and deliberate, making the house feel smaller and smaller as the film goes on.
That restraint carries through to the performances. Julio Díaz never overplays Monteverde’s decline, which makes it more convincing as it unfolds. María Mercedes Coroy is even more effective in the opposite direction. Her stillness gives Alma a presence the film never fully explains, and honestly that’s part of what makes it work.
The political layer is what gives La Llorona its real weight. Drawing from the trial of Efraín Ríos Montt, Bustamante grounds the story in something concrete and unresolved. The protesters outside are not just background noise. They act as a constant reminder of what Monteverde represents, and why his situation feels less like a haunting and more like a reckoning. The supernatural and the political feed directly into each other, giving the film a sense of urgency that most horror never reaches.
La Llorona is not interested in traditional scares, but its slow, unsettling approach makes it worth seeing.
It’s a reminder that what haunts us doesn’t always leave.
Have you seen La Llorona? Drop a comment below and let me know what you thought!
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Much better than the similar film of the same year, and while still quite different from the traditional legend, is nicely tied to real history.
Definitely better than that “Curse of…” movie. Really clever writing intertwining horror and history.