TheWrap by Carlos Aguilar

Invoking genre narrative devices, the entrancingly evocative La Llorona (The Weeping Woman) walks between fact and myth to engender a shrewdly frightening piece of political horror.

Los Angeles Times by Carolina A. Miranda

With this film, Bustamante creates a Llorona full of self-assertion and intent, an indigenous woman assuredly facing the source of her pain. This is a Llorona who is no longer trapped in the past. She has landed fully in the present. And she is ready to extract what is due.

IndieWire by David Ehrlich

La Llorona is a quiet movie that shudders with spiritual trauma.

Paste Magazine by Natalia Keogan

Guatemalan director Jayro Bustamente posits that when the national narrative refuses to recognize the atrocities its own country committed against an entire ethnic group, weaponizing popular legends in order to convey horrifying reality is perhaps the most effective rallying cry—alongside the anguished wails of a tortured mother.

Screen Daily by Lee Marshall

This taut, accomplished film recounts a dark episode in Guatemala’s history as a suspense-laden ghost story based on a myth deeply rooted in indigenous Latin American culture.

Rolling Stone by David Fear

La Llorona is the kind of tale of mystery and imagination that prefers to get under your skin rather than shock your central nervous system, which only makes its near-suffocating feeling of foreboding more potent.

The New York Times by Manohla Dargis

There are some very good scenes in the movie’s second half; even so, it’s striking that the most unsettling aspect of “La Llorona” is that history doesn’t simply shape the movie. It also haunts and finally overwhelms it with terrors far more unspeakable than any impressively manufactured shock.

The Hollywood Reporter by Deborah Young

How this outspoken film, Bustamante’s most gripping to date, will fare domestically is an open question (it has not come out yet in Guatemala). It had a blazing bow in the Venice Days sidebar (Giornate degli Autori), where it easily grabbed the best film prize.

Variety by Guy Lodge

Its tightening tension seeks to push frayed characters to eventually tell on themselves.

Austin Chronicle by Richard Whittaker

Beyond the title, the elegant, calm, and unnerving La Llorona has nothing in common with the bland big budget namesake. If it has real cinematic kin, it's the much harsher and more grotesque "A Serbian Film," or the darkly comedic "Cold Sweat" - even (and especially in the trial sequences) Costa-Gavras' "Music Box."

The Film Stage by Dan Mecca

In the world La Llorona creates, your sins will not only haunt until you make amends–it will haunt those who’ve protected you from those repercussions. Underscored with a foreboding sense of disquiet akin to last year’s Atlantics, the viewing experience is as satisfying as it is provocative.

RogerEbert.com by Monica Castillo

This version of La Llorona finds new emotional ground. It’s not just a creepy story, but a painful reflection of injustice.

The A.V. Club by Katie Rife

What stands out about the film is the pain that lies underneath Bustamante’s placid compositions—an anguished desire for justice that, like the Weeping Woman herself, still cries out to be heard.

Movie Nation by Roger Moore

The performances are subdued, not really pitched to match the rising horror facing them all. Still, you have to hand it to Bustamente. He’s made a La Llorona movie with pointed politics, real world villains and righteous wrath. Sometimes, the horrors are in the headlines, or what the headlines aren’t telling us.