DbcultAccessing Vault...
Cult Review
Senior Film Conservator
There is a moment—halfway through La Llaga—when the camera lingers on a cracked photograph of three faceless farmers standing in front of a green sea of corn. The photo curls at the edges, blistered by years of candle smoke, yet the maize still looks wet, as though the celluloid itself bleeds chlorophyll. That single, silent tableau contains the entire film’s thesis: memory is a crop that refuses to stay harvested.
Director-ethnographer Antonio Galé—who also plays the unnamed patriarch—doesn’t merely act; he erodes. His cheekbones sharpen under the merciless altiplano sun until they resemble the mountain ridge behind him. Every blink costs moisture he cannot spare; every exhalation is a miniature drought. Galé’s physical self-dissolution rhymes with the land’s entropy, forging a symbiosis so total you can smell the guano drying on the stone fence.
Opposite him, Mercedes Ferriz embodies the absent-present wife via voice-over alone—an auditory wound that whispers recipes for pozole while the camera stares at her empty dress on a nail. The strategy flips the usual ghost-story grammar: the dead speak, the living fall mute. Ferriz’s timbre—raw mezcal strained through linen—floods the soundscape until even the rusted gate seems to sob.
Cinematographer Gustavo Curiel shoots drought like a war correspondent. Instead of battlefields we get fissures: veins of cracked mud so wide a child’s foot could vanish ankle-deep. Telephoto lenses compress horizons until sky and soil fuse into a single, copper slab. When the farmer siphons the last tinajón of water, the close-up transforms liquid into molten obsidian—precious, black, doomed. You half expect the ghost of Lon Chaney to materialize, offering snow.
The sound design weaponizes absence. No score—only wind abrasion, distant mule hooves, the creak of a wooden beam remembering forests it will never again see. Silence pools so thickly that when a lone trumpet exhales somewhere off-screen, the shock feels sexual, like cold steel on fevered skin.
La Llaga grafts Magical Realism onto Italian Neorealism with surgical precision, then drips the hybrid with acid-western vitriol. The carnival sequence—equal parts Keaton’s surreal daydreams and Expressionist Malay daggers—unfurls under sodium lights that turn human skin into papaya pulp. A dwarf strongman offers the farmer a demonic pact: “Trade your sorrow for a song; when the music stops, the land drinks itself.” The line arrives sung, not spoken, melody cribbed from a 19th-century son istmeño yet delivered with the metallic detachment of Lang’s master crook.
Meanwhile, the daughter’s Ferris-wheel ascent plays like reverse Icarus: the higher she rises, the more grounded her father becomes in the mineral reality of debt. Each revolution tightens the vice of usury; each glittering car is a coin that will never reach the peasant’s palm. By the time the wheel stops, childhood has been reaped, threshed, and sold by the gram.
Writers Elena Sánchez Valenzuela and Emilia Otaza refuse to anthropomorphize villainy. The debt-collector—seen only via jeep headlights slicing the night—is less a person than a weather system: low pressure, cash-green, fatal. His signature on the promissory note is a fungal spore; foreclosure spreads like corn smut, black, bulbous, delicious to the market. In one bravura monologue delivered to a mule, the farmer lists every crop that refused to grow, each failure a syllable in a new, bitter alphabet: “Maíz, frijol, calabaza… nada.” The words hang, then crumble into the soil they failed to feed.
This is where La Llaga diverges from its agrarian-gothic cousins. Where King Vidor’s cotton corners sanctify the soil, and Autumn’s harvest rituals flirt with pantheism, Galé’s film insists that land under capital is already necrotic. The wound of the title is not metaphor but diagnosis: a suppurating lesion where value is extracted until even memory is commodified.
Knives in La Llaga carry liturgical weight. The farmer’s blade—an heirloom dulled by decades of honing—opens cactus pads, pries nails, and ultimately performs a perverse baptism. In a scene destined for anthology, the father slices the sole of his own foot, lets blood fertilize the sorghum row, then presses the wounded flesh against the soil as if sealing a covenant. The act is framed in profile against a magnesium-white noontime sky; the cut resembles a mouth, the earth its hungry twin. No dialogue, only cicadas and the soft, wet sound of belief.
Compare this to the gloved extremities of classic noir, where touch equals contamination. Here, touch is salvation’s last, flawed currency—yet it buys nothing. The next morning the plants remain skeletal; the only growth is the farmer’s limp.
Post-production drained primary hues until ochre becomes the spectrum’s tyrant. Yet three colors defy the drought:
These chromatic intrusions operate like painful memories: they stab, vanish, linger behind eyelids.
Child actress Emilia Otaza (also co-writer) gives a clinic in pre-verbal acting. Her pupils dilate when tasting tamarindo, contract when handed a coin—micro-concerts of instinct. Watch her in the final shot: standing barefoot on the highway median, she faces an oncoming truck whose headlights bleach her dress into parchment. She doesn’t flinch; instead her fingers open like a fledgling cecropia leaf, releasing the rag doll into the asphalt. The gesture lasts three seconds yet articulates everything—loss, defiance, the absurdity of property.
Galé’s response is equally minimalist. He limps toward the horizon, silhouette shrinking against a wall of dust. No tear, no scream—only the limp, which grows more pronounced until the body itself becomes question mark. The camera refuses to follow; the land swallows him off-frame. End credits roll over the sorghum field, now eerily green, watered by something other than rain.
Critics will reach for Chaplin’s Dictator when decoding the carnival’s political pantomime, or Wharton’s garden of social façades when the farmer confronts town hypocrisy. Yet the true bloodline is Bufuel’s Los Olvidados—same forensic compassion, same refusal to prettify poverty. Like sunken moral rocks beneath a placid village stream, Galé’s narrative drowns you slowly, without hysteria.
Meanwhile, cinephiles tracking eco-horror will place La Llaga beside Hard to Be a God or Even the Rain, yet the film’s stripped-down campesino lens feels closer to Danish salvation dramas—that same Lutheran guilt, transplanted into Catholic soil.
Editor Hugo Riverón employs elliptical cuts that mimic dehydration delirium. A shot of cracked earth holds for five, ten, fifteen seconds—then jump-cuts to the same frame at dusk, clouds bruised violet, implying hours lost like grains through fingers. Diegetic sound bridges these gaps: a rooster crowing at two different mornings, suggesting cyclical entrapment rather than linear time. The strategy recalls Provence’s folkloric loops, yet here the repetition is punitive, not poetic.
Final montage interlaces archival 8 mm footage of real agrarian protests from the 1970s, images bleached almost to extinction. The celluloid scratches resemble rain—a cruel illusion—while voice-over reads privatization decrees issued decades later. History doesn’t rhyme; it dehydrates.
Some viewers will exit feeling colonized—their eyeline complicit in the extraction they just witnessed. That discomfort is intentional. The film withholds catharsis the way a loan shark withholds solvency. You came for redemption, you leave with dust under fingernails. In an era where trauma porn is click-bait, La Llaga dares to aestheticize suffering without resolving it, implicating the spectator in the same speculative gaze that bankrupted the protagonist. You are not audience; you are creditor.
Devastating, immaculate, and stubbornly unresolved, La Llaga carves a new genre: neurotic western. It will haunt you longer than any jump-scare, because its monster is the ledger you balance every April, the deed you covet, the heirloom you hocked. Five stars, but the fifth is the color of a rusted plough—beautiful only under moonlight, lethal at sunrise.
—first published on CelluloidWounds.blog
IMDb 5.6
1924
Community
Log in to comment.
