Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Pedro Páramo’ on Netflix, A Meditation On Death And Sin Featuring Manuel Garcia-Rulfo

The new Netflix film Pedro Páramo doesn’t just star The Lincoln Lawyer himself, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo. The actor is also the grandson of Juan Rulfo, the Mexican author whose 1955 novel Pedro Páramo is adapted here by Rodrigo Prieto – the Academy Award-nominated cinematographer of Brokeback Mountain, Killers of the Flower Moon, and Barbie makes his directorial debut – and screenwriter Mateo Gil. In Pedro Páramo we meet Garcia-Rulfo as young and old versions of the title character, and Tenoch Huerta (Narcos: Mexico) as Pedro’s long lost son. But in this moody, imagery-filled ghost town of a movie, it’s up for debate whether anyone else we meet is living, dead, or existing forever as somewhere in between.   

PEDRO PARAMO: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: When Juan Preciado (Huerta) promised his dying mother he’d 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 rocks, dust, and empty homes and corridors he discovers turns out to be populated mostly by ghosts. In Comala, Juan is greeted by Eduviges (Dolores Heredia), who was once his mother’s best friend. “She told me you were on your way,” Eduviges says, and it’s one of the early indications in Pedro Páramo that this film’s interpretation of time, life, death, and loss are all constantly in flux.

Later, after Juan has seen and heard more strange activity in the village, most of it attributable to unmoored souls on a hunt to finally find rest, he’ll begin to question whether he himself is even alive. Because as he walks and talks with Damania (Mayra Batalla), his babysitter as a child and a servant in the sprawling hacienda owned by cruel 19th century landowner Pedro Páramo (Garcia-Rulfo), and as the film flits further back in time to Páramo’s own impetuous youth, it becomes clear that what we’re dealing with here is a deeply considered mediation. Even in memory, Juan can’t offer his mother closure, because all that’s left of the town where she sent him are the scars and regrets and bad tidings the Páramo family ingrained upon its population as de facto rulers for two generations.

The look, feel, and pacing of Pedro Páramo give it a considered sturdiness that would suit an epic western or a multi-generational family drama. But that stuff is also in service to its profound weirdness, as the mortal provenance of characters comes into question and sequences that cross supernatural elements with religious imagery topple like falling rubble into the period setting that structures the flashbacks. By the time two characters are officially dead, but still conversing in the ground about the events of the film – its voiceovers have ghosts of their own – Pedro Páramo has become an exploration of human life and the weight of regret that truly honors its literary influence.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? The 1992 film Like Water for Chocolate certainly comes to mind – it’s also based on a novel, and like Pedro Páramo, is similarly rich with elements of magical realism. (Laura Esquivel’s 1989 book is also the source material for a recent Max adaptation.) But thematically, you could also align something like Lars von Trier’s Melancholia alongside Pedro Páramo.  

Performance Worth Watching: Ilse Salas really anchors the later section of Pedro Páramo as Susana, a woman so tortured by the memory of what she lost that all she has left are waking dreams and the rending of her garments. 

Memorable Dialogue: “You can’t imagine the number of lost souls who wander these streets. The tormented souls of those who died without repenting, walking these corridors forever. Most met their end when Pedro Páramo was determined to avenge his father’s death…” 

Sex and Skin: A spirit without clothes, who invites Juan to sleep near her, only to melt into mud and squalor. The memories of love lost for a naked Susana, who poses Christ-like in the water. And a towering chorus of chattering naked angels, cherubim who appear to Juan like a Michelangelo fresco in the desert.

Our Take: What’s most real in Pedro Páramo are the feelings of pain and regret that it channels from across the generations. Juan Preciado will never meet his father Pedro, but they are still connected, because as he stands in the abandoned village of Comala, it’s like touching a beacon powered by all the bad shit Páramo did. The film finds more links like this, between Juan’s increasingly tortured journey in the present and the themes that permeated the life of his father – like the glory of God and who deserves it, and the justification of deceit as the cost of doing business, without concern for who it hurts – and as its flashback narrative starts to bleed, spreading through the fabric, it overtakes the question of who is a ghost with a consideration of how one man could create so many.

Our Call: Stream It. In Pedro Páramo, his debut as a director, veteran cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto fully brings to life a famous Mexican novel. But he also does so with a challenging narrative that bounces between the past and a mysterious present that also occasionally feels like purgatory. 

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

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