Ixcanul is a film of subdued collisions, some literal, some shaped as near metaphorical matches. A boar drinking rum to get horny, a woman mothering piglets. Magic fables and dreams clashing with breaches of striking realism, our vulnerable humanity with the harshness of nature. But also, on a note that will prove to be familiar to Bustamante’s oeuvre, the natives’ culture, and language, versus that of the conquistadores.
Looming over the hustling of its characters, are the themes of exploitation and the difficult dialogue history brought to the contemporary Guatemalan society.
Ironically echoing a scene of La Llorona, Ixcanul ends with a closeup on a beautiful Kaqchikel woman—only this time a veil is dropped on her face. It is tempting to lose ourselves in the depth of her firm stare before it’s shut and feel the rumbling of the volcano, or the bite of its creatures.

Temblores moves from the unbelievable to the unbearable, and digs further. It isn’t so much the denounce of an endemic cultural blindness, as the microanalysis of the individual reactions that make it so abrasively convincing. Hinting at broader problems such as that of identity and free will, Bustamante guides us through the absurd, the touching—excruciatingly so, when two children steal a perfume to feel their dad closer and fall asleep tenderly hugging each other—and the near-comedy, as a priest echoes with words of wisdom an already preposterous situation or a religious fanatic lady in a perfect sheath dress gives a Full-Metal-Jacket-like lesson in masculinity to a group of naked men in a shower.
From the very first ambiguous scene to the genius finale, our heart is shaken, our eyes wide open.

However inspired by a rather eerie Latin American folktale, I find calling it a horror film not just misleading but quite reductive. As many traditional legends passed on over the centuries by word of mouth, La Llorona does tell of spirits and monsters, but they are more real and contemporary than we might like to think. Bluntly denouncing, if through fictional characters, blood-curdling historical events while unfolding an intense family drama, its absorbing narrative flow lets the unease crawl under our skin. Now magical, now raw and tense, it gives us the time to reflect, no matter where we are from, on our own culture and the common aberrations of our kind—the one we call human.
La Llorona’s aesthetics and internal imagery are as impactful as the message it delivers. Cold tints prevail while the warm fill the tight visual space metaphorically given to the natives. Water and its creatures are used as signs of an unforgiving past resurfacing. Curtains and veils shape the mystery, the untold, the unspeakable. Particularly masterful is a scene where a Mayan woman candidly recounts her shocking experience at a trial. The camera slowly tracks back, almost defied as the atrocious details are being revealed. Only at the end, she uncovers her face from a beautifully embroidered veil. The truth is out, it won’t hide back any longer. Artfully, this shot mirrors the opening, where a lady that we’ll shortly know be the wife of the retired general accused of genocide, asks God for protection reciting a long, excruciating prayer. Her stare is blank, or aghast. We will know in a couple of hours, when ours will likely be the same.