- Director: Jayro Bustamante
- Writers: Jayro Bustamante, Lisandro Sanchez
- Stars: María Mercedes Coroy, Sabrina De La Hoz, Margarita Kenéfic
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 37 Minutes
Synopsis
We open on a group of women praying in a circle. Credits roll. We see that the woman is Guatemalan General Enrique Monteverde’s wife, and he’s facing some kind of trouble. One of his old aides mentions that, “If the General goes down, we’re next.” The whole household seems really concerned.
That night, the general wakes up, hearing wailing from someone in the bathroom. He gets out a gun and goes looking for whoever it is. There’s no one there. He nearly shoots his servant in the kitchen. He swears he heard wailing, but no one else did. They take away the old man’s gun. His wife and daughter say, “Stress makes Alzheimer’s worse.” All the servants want to quit.
We cut to the hearings, where a woman testifies against the general and his men. They did some pretty bad things against their own citizens. The general insists there was no genocide, but the press is saying he killed 3,000 Mayan Ixil people every month to take over the land. He is found guilty of genocide. His wife is loyal to him, but his own daughter doubts his innocence. A week later, the conviction is overturned by a higher court.
The general finally gets sent home, and he still hears crying. His home is surrounded by literally thousands of protestors, but he’s safe inside with his security men. He focuses on one angry-looking woman in the crowd. She turns out to be the new maid, whose name is Alma.
One night, the old man once again hears wailing, and sees the new maid out in the swimming pool. He watches Alma get out, and she appears to be sleepwalking. He follows her into the bedroom and the other maid screams that he is sexually harassing them. Letona, the security chief, gets him out of there.
The general’s wife dreams about rescuing Mayan children, lost in the cornfield as someone pursues them. She wakes up to find that’s she’s wet the bed. The stress is clearly getting to her.
The general’s daughter, Natalie, knows that the old man had her husband killed, but doesn’t want to face up to it, even though her daughter Sara wants to know what happened to him. His wife, Carmen, begins to realize what a monster he was as well; the nightmares are a sign of it.
There’s an odd stain on the wall behind the general’s bed, and Valeriana the servant thinks black magic is involved, and she does a sort of exorcism on the old man. Letona sees a pair of children that night, and they lead him away. Meanwhile, Sara grabs the old man’s oxygen tank and jumps into the swimming pool. The general shoots her in the arm.
Soon after, they all start seeing ghosts, and they try to pray them away. There are more and more ghosts every few seconds. Carmen has a vision of the things her husband has done, and she strangles him to death, both in the dream and in real life. The ghosts go away.
At the funeral, one of the other generals starts to hear a strange woman crying somewhere…
Commentary
The political stuff was more interesting than I would have expected. The general’s family justifying everything seemed all too realistic. It all goes on a little too long before the creepy stuff starts. It’s almost as if they decided to change direction halfway through the story and added the horror elements later; the ghosts don’t really show up until fifteen minutes before the end.
The cinematography is excellent. Everything is brightly colored, yet it all seems dark and depressing. The stressfulness of the situation is apparent, even though these people deserve what’s coming to them, it’s still very easy to empathize with their situation. Overall, I did like it, but it’s a really slow burn, and other than one final scene, there’s not really much in the way of supernatural stuff happening here. Real Horror, on the other hand, os spread throughout the film.