Pedro Páramo

A sumptuous adaptation of Juan Rulfo’s 1955 literary masterpiece, Pedro Páramo marks the auspicious feature directorial debut of Rodrigo Prieto, the Oscar-nominated cinematographer known for his collaborations with Martin Scorsese and Alejandro González Iñárritu.

Determined to fulfill his mother’s dying wish, Juan Preciado (Tenoch Huerta) travels to Comala to find the father he never knew, a wealthy landowner named Pedro Páramo (Manuel García-Rulfo). But in Comala, nothing is as it seems. Juan speaks with someone, only to be informed that person has died. Deserted streets are suddenly teeming with life. Figures dissolve into soil or are washed away in a deluge. The closer Juan gets to locating his father, the more the realm of the dead eclipses that of the living, while Pedro Páramo’s infamy as a merciless tyrant only burgeons, Will Juan’s spirit be absorbed into the phantasmagorical tapestry of this place where the voices of those who have passed forever echo in the wind?

Working from Mateo Gil’s remarkably faithful screenplay, Prieto casts an intoxicating spell, fusing the carnal with the ethereal, while fluidly darting back and forth in history, between the 1930s and the early days of the Mexican Revolution. A massive influence on Gabriel García Márquez, Pedro Páramo has long been considered the prototype for magic realism and the most important novel in Mexican history. With Prieto’s spectacular iteration of this canonical text, Rulfo’s innovative ghost story can now haunt a wider audience.

DIANA CADAVID

Content advisory: mature themes