A ghostly apparition demands justice in director Jairo Bustamante’s searing political horror film “La Llorona,” about the genocide of indigenous people in Guatemala. In this genre, the Central American author has found an insightful way to discuss the social and political pains of his homeland. With “Rita,” Guatemala’s entry for the International Academy Award (the third time Bustamante has represented the country), he returns to that mode to deliver a dark and gritty fantasy based on an unspeakable 2017 tragedy involving young girls who were placed in a government-run shelter, which continues to… Unpunished to this day. Revealing more details about the case would spoil Rita, but suffice it to say a happy resolution has not been reached.
Thirteen-year-old Rita (Juliana Santa Cruz) arrives at a facility for troubled girls—somewhere between a juvenile detention center and an orphanage—after escaping abhorrent abuse at home. But the conditions there are closer to those of a dilapidated prison. The girls in each room see themselves as distinct creatures from another world, hence the costumes. Rita lands with the angels, the girls wearing feathered wings, but there are also the fairies, the more mysterious group that dominates the “stars.” There is an air of theatricality in the disguises they wear. Since Rita explains that this is not exactly how the events happened, one is initially tempted to think that these strange accessories are nothing but their imagination. The real meaning behind them proves to be much more sinister.
Always a film of stark beauty, Rita exhibits a sometimes dreamlike and sometimes nightmarish quality that cinematographer Inti Briones mines from the contrast between the fantastical costumes and the starkness of the setting, aided by elements of production design as well as some digital effects. Rita, who walks the spectral halls at night, always wearing her wings, is the image of a heavenly creature trapped in an inescapable abyss. This is especially the case when faced with troubling entities, some intangible and others more dangerous than flesh and blood – sexual predators abound among the staff responsible for caring for the girls.
At first, with cautious skepticism, Rita begins to form alliances with other angels, such as the lovable Pepe (Alejandra Vasquez) and the no-nonsense Suli (Angela Quevedo). They have been there longer and have hard intelligence on how to deal with daily horrors.
Over the course of his remarkable career, Bustamante has often succeeded in directing first-time actors into emotionally challenging performances. The group of young actresses, some of whom present characters representing specific archetypes, often appears as a singular, unified entity on screen with room for standouts (Vasquez being one of them). With the demanding lead role, Santa Cruz makes her stunning film debut. Oscillating between anger and vulnerability, Santa Cruz plays a survivor whose only goal is to save her younger sister from being subjected to the same harm she did, and poignantly reflects the indelible hurt that Rita carries behind her eyes. Besides being full of magical realism, what elevates “Rita” is that its teenage heroines are not devoid of courage, nor are they presented as morally pure, but rather as a reaction to the violence and abuse that shaped their young lives. They curse their victim with the sharpest Spanish curses. They smoke. They are smarter, if less powerful, than their captors.
It’s fitting that one of the scariest scenes has nothing to do with the supernatural, but is instead concerned with the horrific ignorance that underpins the conditions that allow the girls to suffer. The long-haired social worker (Margarita Kennefick), sometimes referred to as “The Witch,” summons Rita to her office to inquire about the events that led to her institutionalization. As the teenager explains the brutal actions her father committed against her, the older woman points out that Rita is not blameless in the situation. The heated conversation reflects how the system views these girls – most of them rape victims. One of the guards even justified his actions by explaining that these were not girls, but criminals.
On the production front, “Rita” made history as the first co-production between Guatemala and the United States, through Bustamante’s company La Casa de Producción and the American studio Concordia Studio. Most of the recurring adult actors in Bustamante’s last three films have small roles here, including “Ixcanul” star María Tellon, who plays Rita’s guardian angel, the woman who takes her in after she runs away from home. Both the hero of the gay-themed film “Tremors,” Juan Pablo Olleslager, and the standouts of “La Llorona,” Sabrina de la Hoz, play villainous characters working for oppressive powers.
To powerful, even shocking effect, Bustamante’s incisive writing slowly unfolds revelations that direct us to rethink what we thought we knew about the narrative, particularly regarding the costumes and rituals the girls carried out for their collective safety. However, more than any of his other issue-focused masterpieces to date, “Rita” ultimately falls into a somewhat didactic position. But since the issue on which “Rita” is based remains controversial and unresolved in Guatemala, one can somewhat forgive, or at least understand, the director’s need to clearly articulate his intent through the narrative. However, Bustamante remains an exciting and resourceful narrative artist. If “Rita” is not a complete completion of his talents, it certainly expands his scope to include more complex experimentation in tonality and style, completely freeing himself from the constraints of straightforward realism.