La Llorona

An ageing general, tried for the massacre of Maya communities and acquitted on a technicality, is trapped in his mansion by protesters outside and, inside, by a new indigenous housekeeper who may be something older.

Jayro Bustamante took the Latin American folk figure of La Llorona, the weeping woman who drowned her children, and turned her into an instrument of justice for the victims of the Guatemalan genocide, which the film treats with documentary seriousness through the trial testimony.

It is a slow, restrained, genuinely political horror film, and the haunting is inseparable from the history: the general's own family begins to turn as the truth of what he did seeps into the house.

It is not the 2019 Conjuring-universe film of a similar name. This is the important one.

Guatemala's submission for the foreign-language Oscar, and one of the decade's most serious horror films.