Thursday, February 13, 2025

Movie Review: ‘Rita’ is Magical and Horrific


Director:  Jayro Bustamante
Writer: Jayro Bustamante
Stars: Giuliana Santa Cruz, Ángela Quevedo, Alejandra Vásquez

Synopsis: Rita, a 13-year-old girl, runs away from her abusive father to the big city. She finds solace until she’s placed in a safe house run by the State. Rita and her cellmates plot an escape that ends in a shocking act of violence.


“The more one knows fairy tales the less fantastical they appear; they can be vehicles of the grimmest realism, expressing hope against all the odds with gritted teeth.” 

― Marina Warner

Rita" brings a fairy-tale lens to real-world horror story

Guatemalan director Jayro Bustamante has used elements of the fantastic to excavate the history of oppression of indigenous people in the country. His haunting La Llorona uses the legend of the weeping woman as a punishment for brutal dictators and their regime enablers. In Rita, Bustamante moves into the contemporary by referencing a shocking true case of neglect and abuse inside the ‘reform’ school system for unwanted girls. Part orphanage, part detention center, part state-sanctioned sweatshop and underage sex-trafficking ring. The facility where thirteen-year-old Rita (Giuliana Santa Cruz) finds herself is an inverted fairytale and folkloric world where girls run in wolfpacks, dress as fairies, princesses, angels, but also as stars, bunnies, and rainbows. There are witches, ogres, dungeons, and fairy godmothers. It’s ostensibly 2017, but Bustamante pulls aspects from years of Guatemalan history from cars that would be driven in the 1980s through to antiquated technology. Rita exists in the ‘Once upon a time’ world and the contemporary world.

“When I was seven years old, I stopped believing in fairy tales. I realized the stories that were told did not always end with a happily ever after. The world is not like that. I only began to understand them again later. Without fairy tales, I would have had no hope at all. I would have not been able to face what was coming to me. I was thirteen I ran away from home, but they captured me and sent me to a fortress on a hill just like in a fairy tale… My story begins here. Like all fairy tales, it did not happen exactly like this. But it is what I remember and the only way I dare tell it,” Rita narrates as she sits in the back of the police car ferrying her to the facility. Out the window, she observes young women running wild through the grounds, growling and snarling. Armed guards open the gates. 

Rita’s ‘sin’ was to escape her sexually abusive father and try to save her younger sister from suffering as she did. Transferred from a hospital after she almost bled out from a pregnancy termination (her second), she is led through an impossible network of cages and tunnels. Ash creatures sparkling with Christmas lights appear to her. “You saw nothing,” says the Monitor (Sabrina De La Hoz) as she escorts her to the Quarters of the Angels. Storm clouds gather inside and outside the darkened room as she is violently hazed by winged creatures. Why the girls enacted the violence upon Rita will be explained later in the film. In the morning, she is given her ‘uniform’ – a white crop top and short skirt. She is also given her wings. “If you want to stay in this room, you put them on,” says Terca (André Sebastián Aldana) the leader – a black-winged angel. 

'Rita' Trailer: Jayro Bustamante Is Back To Shatter Your Heart

“I don’t need anyone to protect me,” Rita tells one of the wolfpack as she makes her way through the facility. She will soon find that everyone needs protection, justice, retribution, and freedom. Rita becomes known as ‘Angel 56’ and her ‘class’ is factory sewing. She refuses to put the wings on until she is attacked by the ‘stars’ who claim she must be sacrificed. 

Rita is guided by the wise and foul-mouthed Bebé (Alejandra Vásquez), and Sulmy (Ángela Quevedo), who explain the horrors, both real and possibly imagined. What isn’t imagined is that Ernestina (Margarita Kenéfic), the social worker who is fashioned as a witch, is not going to help her build her case to leave the facility. She asks why Rita didn’t report her father earlier and suggests that she is jealous of the sexual attention he pays to her six-year-old sister. Nor is it imagined that the guard William (Ernesto Molina Samperio) attempts to rape her. 

“The girls who think they’re mystical beings, they’re the craziest of all,” says one of the Stars from their hidden camp in the forest. It was the Stars and Terca’s wife, Majo, who began the first revolution at the facility. Majo hanged herself with Christmas lights so the visitors had to see her. Other stars began to disappear. Bebé says she’s afraid of them as she doesn’t know which are ghosts and which are alive. 

Bustamante and cinematographer Inti Briones construct an elaborate but gritty fantasy. The bruised bodies of children, the swollen bellies of raped girls, the heat of a workshop, and the defeat written on the faces of those who have been taken to ‘clients’ mix with misty forests, glitter, stained glass angels, and girls in flight. The fear Celia (María Telón), Rita’s ‘fairy godmother,’ has for her safety is genuine, just as Rita’s rage and confusion are. The symbolism of stones as souls, burned dolls, and hand-woven sanctuaries with the skeletons of infants enshrined as holy flow into armed police hunting girls as they try to escape their confines. 

Jayro Bustamante seeks to imagine as a child would imagine. Rita’s story is told the only way she dares. For how can a child who has faced systemic horrors explain the world of nightmares and give grace to the fantastical children who suffer, and still suffer, under Guatemalan law?

Rita Review: Jayro Bustamante Remarkably Blends Magical Realism & Horror In  Fantastical Take On A Tragic True Story

Rita is a rich tapestry of truth and fable. The real case it is based on remains ‘unsolved’ – and Bustamante doesn’t shy away from the purpose of Rita which is to highlight hypocrisy and harm; a legacy in his mind that is built into Guatemala and inescapable. Haunting and fiercely political, Rita is searing work by Jayro Bustamante.

Grade: A

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