ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Awais Ali is a writer at Cine Movie (https://cinemoviez.online/), a movie, TV, and anime database publishing daily original entertainment news, reviews, and box-office coverage. He covers international and horror cinema, with a soft spot for the films the algorithm forgot.
In 2019, two films named La Llorona came out. One was a Hollywood jump-scare machine that opened in 3,000 theaters and grossed over $120 million worldwide. The other was a Guatemalan art-house horror film about genocide — and almost nobody in America saw it. Guess which one deserves to be remembered.
Jayro Bustamante’s La Llorona is the best horror film of 2019 that most horror fans have never heard of, a film about the crimes a country tries to forget, itself forgotten by the genre audience it was made for.
Why it got overlooked
Start with the cruelest piece of timing in recent horror history. Bustamante’s film premiered at the Venice Film Festival in August 2019, where it won Best Film in the Giornate degli Autori sidebar. Eight months earlier, Warner Bros. had released The Curse of La Llorona, a Conjuring-universe cash-in built on the same Mexican folktale of the weeping woman. When Bustamante’s film finally reached US audiences in 2020 — via streaming, in the middle of a pandemic, with subtitles — the name was already “taken.” Search algorithms, casual viewers, even some critics conflated the two. The real La Llorona drowned under the studio one.
Distribution didn’t help. This is a Guatemalan-French co-production in Spanish, Kaqchikel, and K’iche’, with no stars, no franchise hook, and a pace that demands patience. It earned a Golden Globe nomination for Best Foreign Language Film and sat above 90% on Rotten Tomatoes, but prestige doesn’t sell tickets the way a trailer with a nun does. On our database at Cine Movie it holds a modest 6.4 from a few hundred votes — the statistical fingerprint of a film people respect more than they’ve actually watched.
What makes it genuinely terrifying
The setup sounds like a chamber drama: retired General Enrique Monteverde, accused of orchestrating the genocide of Maya Ixil civilians during Guatemala’s civil war, is trapped in his mansion by massive street protests after his trial collapses. His staff quits. Only his wife, daughter, granddaughter — and Alma, a mysterious young Maya housekeeper who appears out of nowhere — remain inside.
Bustamante doesn’t do jump scares. The horror here is siege and sound: chanting crowds that never stop, water running where no tap is open, Alma standing motionless in hallways, humming. The weeping woman of the title isn’t a monster who shows up — she’s an atmosphere that seeps in. The film’s great formal gamble is making the audience sit inside the general’s guilt with him, in real time, while the house itself seems to turn against the family.
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Alma, played with unnerving stillness by María Mercedes Coroy, is almost certainly the Llorona figure — but the film never says so outright, and that’s the point. The weeping woman of folklore drowned her children; Enrique drowned a village. The supernatural in this film is barely supernatural at all. When the dead finally come for the general, it plays less like a haunting than like history collecting a debt. The scariest sequence — Alma leading the family’s granddaughter toward the pool — works because the film has spent an hour making you unsure whether Alma is a ghost, an avenger, or simply a woman who has had enough.
The final image reframes everything: this was never really a ghost story. It was a trial the courts refused to hold, conducted by other means.
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Where its reputation stands now
La Llorona closes Bustamante’s loose “insult trilogy” about Guatemala’s marginalized — after Ixcanul (2015) and Tremors (2019) — and it’s the one that travels best, because its engine is universal: what do you do when the law won’t punish the guilty? Seven years on, it has the classic unsung-horror profile: festival laurels, a Globe nomination, critical adoration, and a fraction of the audience of its studio namesake. It’s the rare political horror that never lectures; the dread does the arguing.
Here’s a film about protecting the vulnerable from the powerful. The monsters in La Llorona wear medals, not masks. Give the other one its due.
