‘Pedro Páramo’ Review: Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto’s Adaptation of the Classic Mexican Magical Realism Novel is Otherworldly | TIFF

Long before M. Night Shyamalan’s characters saw dead people, author Juan Rulfo wrote about a whole bunch of them roaming the streets of an abandoned desert town in the 1950s. His epically influential Pedro Páramo, widely considered the most important novel in Mexican literature, created the genre now known as “magical realism,” given that spirits meander the pueblo nostalgically and eerily, to remind the living of the past. Many have tried to adapt this story to the big screen—and all have failed. But, the latest attempt, by cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto (Killers of the Flower Moon, Brokeback Mountain), preserves the story’s core elements in a beautifully rendered, haunting film. The result is both a solid first feature for the cinematographer but also quite possibly the most successful movie version of the story ever made.

The spectral tale begins with a man who we are led to believe will be our principal narrator, Juan Preciado (Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’s Tenoch Huerta), led by an ass-bearing peasant to the mysterious and abandoned town of Comala, which is buried deep in a valley of dust and tumbleweeds in a central Mexican desert. Juan tells the man that he is Pedro Páramo’s long-lost son, and he is coming to look for his estranged father to fulfill his recently deceased mother Dolores’ deathbed wish. The crumpled old man stares straight ahead and announces that he, too, is Pedro’s son—and that Páramo died many years ago.

Undaunted, Juan marches on to Comala, arriving in the dark of night to find only broken cobblestones and empty porches. Prieto, also without skipping a beat, dutifully follows. The moon provides the only moody light, and Prieto’s signature stylistic cinematography is immediately on full display. If anything, his film is a visual beauty that deserves additional lighting accolades for the now accomplished director. Under this unnatural glare, an old woman, Doña Eduviges, greets Juan. She dons a sarape and ushers Juan into an abandoned inn that is full of knick-knacks, of which she complains absentmindedly. It is also full of the spirits of the past. Eduviges carries a candelabra and begins to tell Juan about Comala, its people, and its decline. She becomes his window into the past, and her story quickly becomes one of ghosts, death, betrayal, and lost loves.

Rulfo’s work is famously and purposefully inscrutable and difficult to comprehend. From this moment on, he assaults your senses with a fusillade of characters and names, even if he never intends to use them ever again. He ambulates without any warning between the past, the distant past, the very distant past, and the present (to the extent one even exists in the novel). And, most confounding and groundbreakingly of all, he switches narrators at will. About a third of the way in, an old housemaid known as Damiana appears, and tells Juan that Eduviges herself has been dead for many years. Again, Prieto dutifully follows his inspiration, substituting Damiana as Juan and the viewer’s eyes into the tale of the father Juan is searching for.

At the center of the morass is the titular character, portrayed by Manuel Garcia-Rulfo of The Magnificent Seven and with no relation to the book’s author. Páramo is a villain that, to 2024 audiences, should be instantly recognizable. A sombrero-donning, horse riding, landowner tyrant who treats women as commodities, orders at will killings, and exploits those who enrich him and his properties. Beneath the machismo, he is also a romantic—his lifelong love for the troubled Susana San Juan (Ilse Salas) is real and the one thing that will eventually kill him. He is a pious man—even if he has to bribe the colorful town priest to achieve his goals. And he has also suffered, including through loss of the one son he recognized as his own, Miguel Páramo, or the murder of his father, which sets Pedro on a bloody, lifelong quest for vengeance and murder.

To say that it is spectacularly difficult to adapt this remarkably complex work would be an understatement. But Prieto is clearly a fan of the source material as is his screenwriter, Gil Fuentes. Many have previously tried and failed to adapt it, including with tricks such as smoothing out the timeline, sticking to a single narrator, and eliminating characters. It is as if one found a particular piece of Origami to have too many folds, a Lego building to have too many pieces, and choose to iron out, presenting them flat and disjointed instead. It has never worked.

Prieto’s and Fuentes’ version, by contrast, is emphatically faithful to the source material, almost to a fault. When the narrative switches to two dead characters who are speaking to each other because they are buried in the same grave, the film follows them. When narrators lie about stories from the past, the movie presents them to you. And where the novel refuses to use hints and clues to orient the reader, Prieto admirably—almost incredibly—resists the temptation to add his own cinematic breadcrumbs—a changing hair color, a specific transition. To be sure, he has a little more help. He can use makeup to signify a character’s age. But even that trick is applied sparingly and subtly, still leaving space for much confusion.

Thanks to all these choices, Pedro Páramo the film is just as haunting and has the same profound staying power, as the book it comes from. Garcia-Rulfo is perfectly cast as the complex villain. A dramatic, wistful score by Gustavo Santoella (who worked with Pietro on Brokeback Mountain), furthers the movie’s phantasmagoric feeling, as do the crumbling but carefully rendered sets and the quiet but ever-present aging makeup. Prieto leaves nothing to chance, and his film is a visually stunning beauty in addition to a storytelling one.

More than anything, however, it is the profound power of the story that makes Pedro Páramo worth your while. Long considered the genesis story for magical realism, fans of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude would be forgiven for gasping when they recognize nearly every element of that beautiful novel on the big screen watching this movie. Garcia Marquez openly and repeatedly acknowledged that everything in his book, from the ghostly little abandoned town to the generations of suffering to the central villain patriarch character, all were inspired directly by Rulfo’s masterpiece. Garcia Marquez’ book in turn inspired a plethora of others from Latin American and beyond. The book became to the genre what The Godfather became to gangster movies.

As Prieto’s parade of characters prances across his beautifully lit screen, it becomes obvious why the story had such influence. Beyond the story of ghosts, Rulfo’s—and now Prieto’s—is a story of a nation. It is a story of an evil if well-intended, white European baron who takes over the land. Who rapes the local, indigenous, copper-skinned woman. She, in turn, gives birth to a people. A people born from that violent act that defines them, from that supposedly unholy mixture of the continents. Because of that origin, the people of Mexico will never be able to escape their fate—their folkloric, charmed fate. The strains of nostalgia, the shadows of death, the animus of corruption, the religious fervor, all will follow them forever, as the ghosts of Pedro Páramo and the other citizens of Comala haunt the abandoned town forever.

Given all of the correct choices he and his talented crew made, Prieto’s version is, incredibly, the first ever truthfully successful adaptation of an impossibly difficult to shoot book.

Could he try his hand at Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, next?

Grade: A

This review is from the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival where Pedro Páramo had its world premiere. Netflix will release the film in the U.S. on November 6, 2024.