While magical realism fiction may now be a familiar genre for many readers, its origins can be traced back to a single groundbreaking novel from 1955, Pedro Páramo by Mexican author Juan Rulfo.
The story tells of a man named Juan Preciado who journeys to a mysterious abandoned town in search of his dead father, only to find the place inhabited by spirits of people from generations past. Rulfo pioneered a style that blended everyday details with hallucinatory elements, forever changing the landscape of Latin American literature.
Many years later, the visionary director of photography Rodrigo Prieto set out to bring Rulfo’s masterpiece to the screen for his directorial debut. Prieto is no stranger to vivid, transportive worlds, having lensed visually stunning films like Babel and Silence.
Stepping behind the camera for Pedro Páramo, he aimed to faithfully recreate the unsettling, disorienting atmosphere that marked Rulfo’s prose. The result was this haunting film, which premiered to acclaim at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2024.
In this review, we will explore Prieto’s stylistic achievement in crafting a cinematic tale of spirits trapped between realms. We’ll examine his devoted adaptation of Rulfo’s notoriously difficult narrative structures and time shifts. And we’ll analyze the moving examination of trauma’s lingering effects down through generations that lies at the story’s melancholic heart. So pour yourself a drink, get comfortable, and prepare to be drawn into the shadows of Pedro Páramo’s ghost-filled domain.
Characters of the Past
This ghostly tale centers around Juan Preciado and the mysterious man he seeks, Pedro Páramo. Arriving under moonlight to the abandoned town of Comala, Juan finds only an elderly innkeeper named Eduviges waiting. She greets him warmly and offers insight into the town’s demise.
Flashbacks reveal Pedro Páramo’s rise to power and wealth through marriage, though sending his wife away. As the wealthy landowner, he dominated the entire region through fear and manipulation. But his heart remained with Susana, a woman from his youth who returns decades later, further fueling his obsession and cruelty.
The story toggles deftly between time periods as more characters emerge. Father Renteria grapples with absolving Pedro’s sins while seeing his harm. Dorotea trades her body in the wake of his abuse. Fulgor toils as his hardened foreman. Through it all, the specter of Pedro looms over the town, even years after his death.
Juan serves as our guide but falters as the tale focuses more on Pedro. Still, Juan witnesses the tragic legacy of his corruption through the eyes of Eduviges, Damiana, and others impacted across eras. Through nonlinear story beats, we grasp how one man’s evil radiated throughout this community, forever haunting the living and dead alike.
The film dissects the far-reaching impact of abuse of power and inherited trauma on a community. In the vacant streets of Comala, ghosts wander, bearing scars from Pedro’s sins that still ripple down through history. An entire populace becomes trapped in a purgatory not of their own making but born from the violent and vengeful acts of one man decades past.
Faithful to its Confusing Core
Bringing Juan Rulfo’s renowned novel to screens seemed an impossible task, with past attempts simply unable to grasp its complexity. The story shifts loosely between timelines and viewpoints, rarely offering clarification. But rookie director Rodrigo Prieto accepted the challenge, determined to honor the source material’s disorienting spirit.
Adapting such an experimental work was fraught with difficulties. Others had tried to impose order with a single narrator or prune characters, but this stripped away Rulfo’s unique qualities. Prieto instead chose to mirror the book’s narrative whiplash. When it switched focus between the living and dead, between eras, so too did the film.
Prieto moved scenes fluidly between Comala’s haunted present and Páramo’s sordid rise, mirroring the story’s fragmented nature. Varying perspectives enriched how we viewed the once-powerful landowner, from the eyes of his victims to through the lens of personal flashbacks. Like Rulfo guiding readers through the shadows, the film trusts viewers can piece together the shrouded past on their own.
For some, this faithfulness came at the cost of accessibility. By preserving the inherent confusion, casual viewers risked losing their way in the film’s twists of time and place. Yet for those familiar with Rulfo’s tome, Prieto’s interpretation felt authentic in conveying the characters’ criss-crossing experiences through a purgatorial town.
In refusing to streamline such a tricky work, Prieto succeeded where others stumbled. His “Pedro Páramo” echoes the book’s unforgettable disquiet, leaving audiences enveloped in the same shroud of questions and discomfort as Rulfo’s perplexed readers. An ambitious effort to translate literary artistry to screens.
Prieto’s Haunting Vision
From his days as a lauded cinematographer, it was clear Rodrigo Prieto possessed a gift for transporting viewers to visually stunning realms. Pedro Páramo, he brings these skills to the forefront as director, enveloping the story in exquisitely haunted imagery.
Working in tandem with production designer Eugenio Caballero, Prieto crafted the crumbling ghost town of Comala like an unwelcoming anomaly risen from the desert wastelands. Crumbling structures loom amongst dust and shadows, devoid of life yet pulsing with histories just out of sight. It’s a setting that immediately sets the skin to crawling.
With director of photography Alfonso Herrera, Prieto wields light and atmosphere like a maestro. Harsh sunlight pierces murky interiors, illuminating fleeting glimpses of the past. Moonlight blankets the town in a pale, ethereal glow to match its residents’ spectral appearances. Every dim corner comes alive with potential phantoms.
Prieto’s camera flows fluidly, soaking in mise-en-scene with a fluid, languid pace befitting the story’s unsettled nature. His roaming lenses drift as restlessly as the souls confined within Comala, inviting viewers to absorb each frame’s wealth of suggestive details.
Gustavo Santoalla’s stirring score perfectly underscores the film’s bleak yet melodic tone. String arrangements swell joyously at odds with scenes of suffering, mirroring life’s bittersweet duality. His music amplifies sequences to unnerving, emotional heights.
With his directorial debut, Prieto brings a masterful control of visual language to alchemize Rulfo’s challenging prose into an equally bewitching experience. Pedro Páramo stands as an extraordinary first effort—and a stunning showcase of its creator’s immense cinematic prowess.
Prieto Crafts an Atmosphere of Dread
Rodrigo Prieto brings considerable skill to transforming Rulfo’s intricate world into cinema. As a cinematographer of prestige films like Babel, his eye dazzles. Now making his directorial debut, Prieto masters creating unease through visual prowess.
The crumbling ghost town of Comala appears wholly inhospitable. Weathered structures filled with gloom become conduits for probing history’s shadows. Production design fleshes out every crevice with nuanced life, from Eduviges’ cluttered inn to Páramo’s decaying hacienda. Each frame feels dense with implications.
Within this setting, Prieto’s camera flows like a prowling spirit. Harsh desert sun and moonlight penetrate the ruins at opportune moments, letting fragments of the past emerge. His lighting infuses ordinary moments with portent while maintaining fluidity between timelines.
Joining Prieto is renowned cinematographer Alfonso Herrera, whose work further immerses the unnatural world. Varied camerawork captures the confounding essence of dead souls roaming amid living. Their collaboration marries atmospheric horror with artful storytelling.
Sound alike plays its role, from ominous diegetic noises to Gustavo Santoalla’s stirring score. His compositions swell to mirror hope, transforming to haunting wrath over generations. Music becomes another unsettling voice from Comala’s murky fathoms.
Through visual panache, Prieto transports viewers into a living purgatory. His directing debut proves a stunning showcase of talents honed over decades, now manifesting Rulfo’s uncanny and unforgettable visions.
Bringing Rulfo’s Residents to Life
At the center of this ghostly fray is Tenoch Huerta’s Juan Preciado. With little dialog but immense expressiveness, he embodies the confusion and determination of a man haunted by his lineage. Subtle gestures convey an inner struggle as Juan bears witness to his surname’s tragic history.
Perhaps the film’s greatest accomplishment is Manuel Garcia-Rulfo’s chilling Pedro Páramo. Under calm features lies a toxic core, revealed as past misdeeds resurface. Switching deftly between charisma and cruelty, he instills unease purely through an unsettling, ambiguous magic. Garcia-Rulfo inhabits Rulfo’s most complex creation with unnerving precision.
Supporting players equally brings the scattered townsfolk to life. As Eduviges and Damiana, Dolores Heredia and Marictzá Oliva imbue their spectral roles with a tangible lived-in quality. Ilse Salas subtly sculpts layers into the troubled Susana through lingering glimpses. Together they breathe visceral life into spirits tethered to the material world.
Admittedly, Prieto’s adaptive approach leaves some figures, like Fulgor, less fully realized. Yet the cast excels at hinting at histories beyond their snippets, much as Comala’s residents endure, half-seen. They evoke entire lives through miniscule gestures, respecting Rulfo’s refusals to over-explain enigmatic souls.
Lingering Ghosts of the Past
Pedro Páramo dissects how the errors of history continue reverberating through communities and bloodlines. Juan’s arrival in the ghostly purgatory of Comala sees him exposed to generations of trauma stemming from one man’s corrupting influence.
Pedro’s tyrannical reign inflicted abuse that poisoned the town for decades. As past sins resurface through the townspeople’s haunted stories, we see how power corrupted absolutely. Even death provides no escape from the ripples of one’s immoral deeds. An entire populace becomes trapped, reliving tragedies born of a single man’s depraved acts.
Prieto also spotlights the Catholic church’s complicity through Renteria’s struggles. Absolution meant little to real victims when perpetrators faced no true penance. The film questions whether any institution, interpreting deific matters, can claim infallibility in complex moral dilemmas impacting humanity.
Parallels arise to stronger modern individuals subjugating the vulnerable and institutions enabling their behavior through legalities and tradition over compassion. Like Pedro, their misdeeds linger as societal wounds.
While rooted in Mexico’s revolutionary period, “Pedro Páramo” taps into more universal anxieties. How can communities recover from toxicity in their histories? Can new generations ever shake off burdens belonging to old regimes or find solace from pains handed down despite gaining freedom? The ghostly tale retains unsettled poignancy.
Haunting Ghosts of the Past
Rodrigo Prieto accepted an immense challenge in bringing Rulfo’s nonlinear masterpiece to screens. Where others trimmed away its complexities, he maintained the work’s ambiguous, unsettling spirit.
While not without flaws, Prieto’s commitment to honoring the source material cannot be denied. He transports viewers into the text’s disquieting psyche, never shying from its psychological mysteries. Through atmosphere and visual control, Prieto weaves Comala’s ghosts into the fabric of the film.
Pedro Páramo stands as a landmark directorial debut, showcasing Prieto’s immense talents. His images drift and permeate like the restless souls confined within this purgatory. Imperfections fade beside such an evocative vision crafted with artistry, paying homage to magical realism’s origins.
As an adaptation, it cannot be faulted for attempting the impossible—capturing a novel defined by its refusal to surrender entirely to interpretation. Pedro Páramo endures in memory, its hauntings no less powerful for resisting simple explanation. In sparking new imaginings of Rulfo’s characters, Prieto’s film ensures their hauntings will endure for generations to come.
Four out of five ghosts. Pedro Páramo is a beautifully haunting memorial to literary brilliance, bound to keep viewers enthralled in its mysterious depths for years to come.
The Review
Pedro Páramo
Rodrigo Prieto's Pedro Páramo is an impressively faithful and hauntingly atmospheric cinematic translation of Juan Rulfo's landmark novel. While not without flaws in narrative cohesion, Prieto preserves the essence of magical realism's genesis story through his masterful control of visuals and tone. Fans of the source material will find much to appreciate in this evocative vision that ensures the ghosts of Comala shall linger in memory.
PROS
- Faithful adaptation that captures the complexity and spirit of Rulfo's novel
- Beautiful, striking visuals that immerse viewers in the disquieting world
- Strong performances that bring characters to life
- Deep exploration of lingering trauma, inherited sins, and corruption of power
CONS
- Narrative lacks coherence at times due to nonlinear structure.
- Pacing can feel lethargic for some viewers.
- Not all characters are fully developed.
