As cinemas tentatively reopen, many of the year’s best films continue to forsake them in favour of streaming – sometimes popping up in highly unpredictable places. If you aren’t a hardcore devotee of horror film, chances are you don’t have a subscription to Shudder, a fine genre platform with programming that often stretches beyond the expected slash-and-scream territory. If so, you’re missing out on a remarkable new film from Guatemala that is exclusively streaming there. Much acclaimed on the festival circuit last year, Jayro Bustamante’s La Llorona may burrow under your skin with unsettling atmospherics, but it has as much to offer arthouse patrons as it does horrorheads in its adherence to a tradition of horror cinema with a real-world political undercurrent.
Bustamante’s 2015 debut, Ixcanul, sadly never released in the UK, was a delicately transporting sociological study of indigenous community. La Llorona takes broader, more aggressive stylistic swings, while remaining sensitively embedded in local culture and horrific history. Bustamante’s film is rooted in the eponymous Latin American legend of the Weeping Woman, the restless, mourning ghost of a mother who drowned her children. Here, though, the fable has been cleverly adapted to represent the trauma of Guatemala’s Mayan genocide of the 1980s.
The film presents a wealthy household in a state of claustrophobic turmoil, with furious crowds outside threatening to break down the walls. Yet the evil, it emerges, is inside. We’re in the home of one of the country’s commanding generals – based on the real-life dictator and war criminal Efraín Ríos Montt, who died in 2018. Young Mayan housemaid Alma (the placidly disquieting María Mercedes Coroy) seems oblivious to the crisis she has walked into, yet her arrival coincides with a sequence of misfortunes on her house-arrested employers. What ensues is best experienced first-hand: Bustamante’s riveting, slow-burning storytelling mixes enigmatic spiritualism with full-throttle scares and seething rage against the ruling class.
It’s among the most direct and potent examples I’ve seen of political horror, a subgenre that can range from glancing, nudging satire to all-guns-blazing allegory. Though its style is less baroque, La Llorona put me in mind of the historical terror in Guillermo del Toro’s great pair of Spanish civil war horrors. Pan’s Labyrinth (2006; available on iTunes), which vividly pits child’s-eye fantasy against violent Francoism, got the mainstream acclaim and Oscar wins, but I’m more haunted by its visceral, slithering predecessor, 2001’s The Devil’s Backbone (on Amazon), the desolate orphanage setting of which becomes a microcosm of republican-versus-nationalist conflict, making a looming monster of fascism in the process.
Jordan Peele obviously knows this genre inside out. Get Out (2017; on Amazon) made wittily literal white America’s exploitation and appropriation of black identity, while last year’s Us (Now TV) delved deeper into black class strata. No surprise that Peele is producing a forthcoming reimagining of Bernard Rose’s landmark 1992 horror film, Candyman (on Google Play), which itself plunged into heady allegorical territory. Its tracing of a spooky urban legend to the far more frightening abuses and iniquities of slavery in America hits hard in the age of Black Lives Matter.
Hollywood horror film-makers are getting blunter with their political messaging. Indeed there’s nothing subtextual about the left-versus-right warfare depicted in the recent The Hunt (Sky Store) and The Purge franchise (the most blatant of which, The Purge: Election Year (2016), is on YouTube’s rental service). The films themselves are dim and concrete-heavy, but they’ll be essential Obama-to-Trump-era time capsules some day.
George A Romero’s jaggedly effective satirical horror films now fit into that political timepiece column, though they’ve always worked as straight-up entertainments. 1973’s The Crazies (Microsoft Store) reflects the public’s Vietnam-era governmental distrust in its lurid study of a Pennsylvania town turned psychotically upside down by biomedical infection of the water supply, while Night of the Living Dead (1968; Amazon Prime and Shudder) found parallels for an American society splintered by civil rights protests and countercultural uprising in a chaotic zombie apocalypse, giving the genre its first black lead in the magnetic Duane Jones.
A decade earlier in 1956, Don Siegel’s drum-tight alien-invasion horror Invasion of the Body Snatchers (iTunes) found a shivery metaphor for the insidious philosophical spread and brainwashing tactics of McCarthyism. By the time Philip Kaufman brilliantly remade it in 1978 (iTunes again), its vacant “pod people” were victims of new-age conformist pop psychology. In political horror, the threats can keep changing; the essential monsters remain the same.
Also new to streaming and DVD this week
Wonders in the Suburbs
(Mubi)
French star Jeanne Balibar makes her directorial debut with a giddily absurdist political comedy, charting various eccentric obstacles faced by a newly elected outer-Paris mayor. It’s amusing, though its relentless daffiness won’t be to all tastes.
The Rifleman
(Spirit, 15)
This brash, blustering first world war epic broke all-time box-office records in its native Latvia, where old-fashioned, gung-ho patriotism is clearly still in style. Dzintars Dreibergs’s film lacks emotional nuance, but its set pieces have some real bravado.
The High Note
(Universal, 12)
There’s the ghost of a sharper film in this agreeable music business comedy, which never bites when it can smile. It gets by on the combined likability of Tracee Ellis Ross, as an ageing diva on the comeback trail, and Dakota Johnson as her beleaguered PA.
Taste of Cherry
(Sony, PG)
Underrated is hardly the word for a Palme d’Or winner, yet it feels as if Abbas Kiarostami’s sublime 1997 fable of morality and mortality is due another round of celebration. This well-appointed Criterion edition is a good start.
