Stream or skip?

New Netflix movie Pedro Paramo not just a star Lincoln Lawyer Manuel Garcia-Rulfo himself. The actor is also the grandson of Juan Rulfo, a Mexican writer whose 1955 novel Pedro Paramo Adapted here by Rodrigo Prieto, the film’s Academy Award-nominated cinematographer. Brokeback Mountain, Killers of the Flower Moon, And Barbie makes his directorial debut and screenwriter Mateo Gil. IN Pedro Paramo we meet Garcia-Rulfo as the young and old versions of the main character, as well as Tenoch Huerta (Narcos: Mexico) as Pedro’s long-lost son. But in the film’s moody, image-filled ghost town, it’s debatable whether anyone else we meet is alive or exists forever, somewhere in between.

PEDRO PARAMO: STREAM OR SKIP?

Essence: When Juan Preciado (Huerta) promised his dying mother that he would find the father he never knew in the remote Mexican town of Comala, he didn’t know what to expect. But the barren expanse of stones, dust, empty houses and corridors that he discovers turns out to be inhabited mainly by ghosts. In Comala, Juan meets Eduviges (Dolores Heredia), who was once his mother’s best friend. “She told me you were on your way,” Eduviges says, and this is one of the first signs that Pedro Paramo that the film’s interpretation of time, life, death and loss is constantly changing.

Later, after Juan sees and hears more strange activities in the village, much of it related to unanchored souls hunting to finally find peace, he begins to doubt whether he himself is alive. Because as he walks and talks with Damania (Mayra Batalla), his childhood nanny and servant at the sprawling hacienda owned by cruel 19th-century landowner Pedro Páramo (García-Rulfo), and as the film flashes further in time to Páramo , our own stormy youth, it becomes clear that we are dealing with a deeply thought-out mediation. Even in flashbacks, Juan cannot offer his mother closure because all that remains of the city she sent him to are the scars, regrets and bad news that the Paramo family has ingrained in its population as de facto rulers for two generations .

Look, feel and pace Pedro Paramo give it a thoughtful strength that would be at home in an epic Western or a multi-generational family drama. But the material also serves its deep strangeness, as characters’ mortal origins are called into question and sequences that mix supernatural elements with religious imagery crash like falling debris into the period setting that structures the flashbacks. By the time the two characters are officially dead but still talking underground about the events of the film – his voiceover has its own ghosts – Pedro Paramo became an exploration of human life and a burden of regret that truly does justice to his literary influence.

What films will it remind you of? 1992 film. Like water for chocolate of course, it comes to mind – this is also based on the novel, and like Pedro Paramoalso rich in elements of magical realism. (Laura Esquivel’s 1989 book is also the source material for the recent Maximum adaptation.) But thematically it would be possible to even out something, like Lars von Trier Melancholy near Pedro Paramo.

Performance worth watching: Ilse Salas really takes center stage in the last part Pedro Paramo as Susana, a woman so tormented by the memories of what she has lost that all she has left are waking dreams and torn clothes.

Memorable dialogue: “You cannot imagine how many lost souls are roaming these streets. The tormented souls of those who died without repenting forever walk along these corridors. Most of them met their end when Pedro Paramo decided to avenge the death of his father…”

Sex and skin: A spirit without clothes who invites Juan to spend the night next to her, but he dissolves in dirt and squalor. Memories of lost love for a naked Susana posing in the water like Christ. And a high chorus of chattering naked angels, cherubs that seem to Juan like a Michelangelo fresco in the desert.

Our opinion: What is most realistic in Pedro Paramo are feelings of pain and regret that are passed down from generation to generation. Juan Preciado will never meet his father Pedro, but they are still connected because when he stands in the abandoned village of Comala, it is like touching a lighthouse, powered by all the bad shit Paramo has done. The film makes more similar connections between Juan’s increasingly harrowing journey in the present and the themes that permeated his father’s life – such as the glory of God and who deserves it, and the justification of deception as the cost of doing business without worrying about who gets it. hurts—and as his flashback narrative begins to bleed, spreading through the fabric, it displaces the question of who the ghost is with the pondering of how one man could create so much.

Our call: Flow it. IN Pedro Paramo, With his directorial debut, veteran cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto brings the famous Mexican novel to life to the fullest. But he also does this through a complex narrative that teeters between the past and a mysterious present that sometimes feels like purgatory.

Johnny Loftus@glennganges) is a freelance writer and editor living at large in Chicago. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media and Nicki Swift.