"The fantastic level and the realistic level are the two levels upon which we live," Richard Burton said in The Night of the Iguana. La Llorona — not to be confused with the Curse/Legend of La Llorona — operates equally well on both levels, which in this case we might re-label the legendary level and the historical level.

Enrique Monteverde (Julio Díaz) is an aging, infirm, and paranoid Guatemalan dictator (but then aren’t they all, eventually?) who at the beginning of the film is being tried for the genocide of Ma-yan natives in the 1980s.

We see two trial scenes; the most effective is a... read the rest.