La Llorona

Former Guatemalan general Enrique Monteverde — a thinly veiled stand-in for dictator Efraín Ríos Montt — is convicted of orchestrating the genocide of indigenous Mayan communities in the early 1980s. The conviction is swiftly overturned on procedural grounds. Outraged protesters surround his gated compound day and night, chanting and drumming without rest.

Monteverde's household retreats inward. His wife Carmen maintains an imperious calm. Their daughter Natalia is frightened. Servants begin disappearing one by one — driven off by fear, or perhaps by something else. A new maid named Alma arrives, silent and unknowable, and assumes control of the household.

Monteverde's dementia is advancing. He cannot sleep. He hears weeping at night — from outside, he's told, from the protesters. But the sound is also inside the walls. He sees movement at the edges of vision, the faces of the dead. Alma watches him with something unreadable. The distinction between what is haunting him and what he is remembering dissolves.

The film never explains outright whether Monteverde's experiences are supernatural or the disintegration of a guilty mind. What becomes clear is that Alma is connected to the legend of La Llorona — the weeping woman who lost her children to violence — and to the massacre victims. The dead have found their way inside.

Monteverde dies — not dramatically, but with the quiet inevitability of a man overtaken by what he spent decades refusing to face. Alma disappears. The protesters continue outside. The house falls silent.