La llorona
2021 · 13m · España
Directed by Gustavo Fontans
Pilar, a young woman who moves into a new house near Parque Rivera, soon feels stalked by something living in the place and must seek help and face her worst fears.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
La llorona leans hard into the most predictable myth in the horror playbook—haunted house, folklore specter, woman in peril—and doesn't seem interested in kicking the machinery apart, which is fine if you're fishing for competence, but I'm fishing for a reason to stay awake.
Fontans works within the Latin American gothic tradition with evident respect for the mythos, and the formal control—particularly in how he stages the uncanny domesticity of Pilar's space—shows a director aware of the lineage he's occupying, even if the execution doesn't quite escalate beyond capable genre craft.
The real engine here is the sound design: the way ambient dread lives in the spaces between dialogue, how the mix gradually contaminates the domestic soundscape until Pilar's own house becomes sonically hostile—that single commitment to audio dread is what separates this from a dozen other lo-budget La llorona retreads.