La Llorona 2019

Former Guatemalan dictator Monteverde (based on Efraín Ríos Montt) is convicted for orchestrating the genocide of the native Mayans in 1982–83. Now elderly, he lives with his wife Carmen, his daughter Natalia, granddaughter [Sara](/ actor/ayla-elea-hurtado) and their security guard Letona. During the trial, [Natalia] is troubled by indigenous women’s accounts of brutal acts by Monteverde’s army, while [Carmen] dismisses them as lies. The high court overturns the verdict, ruling the crime cannot be conclusively proven, sparking relentless protests outside Monteverde’s home that keep the family confined inside.

The tension thickens when the house is unsettled by a sequence of supernatural disruptions. The housekeeper, Valeriana, brings in a young woman named Alma to work as a maid, and water-related phenomena begin to intensify. One night, Monteverde glimpses Alma wading through the pool and entering the house. The family discovers him watching Alma wash her dress, his reaction revealing a long-held attraction to indigenous women. Carmen confides in [Natalia] that Monteverde’s impulses have always leaned toward native women, deepening the sense of a hidden history within the household. Alma has a painful past—she has a son and a daughter who died—and she later teaches [Sara] to hold her breath underwater, binding the girl’s fate to the water-world that haunts the home.

Outside, the protests persist and grow louder, effectively trapping the family. Inside, Carmen experiences nightmare visions of being a Kaqchikel woman abducted with two children by soldiers, and the walls fill with flyers about disappeared people from decades earlier. [Valeriana] hints that Alma’s origins may be shrouded in mystery, and Alma herself carries an unspoken trauma that binds her to the house. The atmosphere thickens as the living and the dead intersect: the protestors include a man who appears on the flyers, a stark reminder of the long memory of the violence.

Valeriana tries to purify the house with a Mayan cleansing, while Alma teaches [Sara] to breathe with the water’s rhythm. In a climactic moment, the family witnesses the spirit-world erode the boundaries of the home. [Letona] encounters the spirits of two Kaqchikel children, who calmly lead him away, as if drawing him into the same unseen wave of history that saturates the house. A ritual by Valeriana unfolds, accompanied by the wail of a woman, and Carmen slips into a trance that reveals Alma’s last moments: watching her children drown as soldiers close in, and herself being executed by Monteverde.

The revelation crashes into the present as Carmen, overwhelmed by the remembered horror, strangles Monteverde in both the trance and the waking world. The funerary sequence that follows hints at the continuation of the violence beyond the man’s death: at Monteverde’s funeral, an old general slips away to the bathroom, where a woman’s wail grows into the sound of water flooding the room, suggesting that the past’s wounds still surge beneath the surface.