‘Pedro Páramo’ is an Exploration of Death Through Magical Realism

'Pedro Paramo' starring Manuel García-Rulfo uses magical realism to explore death and grieving

Pedro Paramo

Photo: Pedro Páramo - Production Still Image Courtesy of Netflix

Warning: Spoilers Ahead

If you’ve ever read Latin American literature, you’ll know that death, grief, and spirituality are common themes found in many famous novels like One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez and The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende. Both in fiction and in real life, many of us hold a special relationship with our ancestors and the dead to the point that ghost stories aren’t merely old wives’ tales or folklore to scare us as children. For many of us who were born in LATAM or are descended from LATAM, we know that ghosts are as real as any other natural force. And unlike Western cultures, we often regard them with fascination and reverence rather than fear, especially on important cultural days like Day of the Dead. That’s why the latest film adaptation of Pedro Páramo, based on the classic landmark magical realism novel of the same name by Juan Rulfo released in 1955, is so important. Pedro Páramo, directed by Rodrigo Prieto and starring Manuel García-Rulfo, 43, (The Lincoln Lawyer) as Pedro Páramo and Wakanda Forever star Tenoch Huerta, 43, as Juan Preciado premiered worldwide on Netflix on November 6 and is a powerful testament to the important role that death and the afterlife hold in many LATAM cultures.

“There’s a line in the book that says, ‘We are all sons of Pedro Páramo.’ That’s so, so beautiful and so representative, because for me, that means we are all sons of Mexico. I guess every country or every community is built with blood, corruption and wars,” García-Rulfo told NBC News. “The other day, one of the actors said it so beautifully: In Mexico, we don’t know if we are celebrating a party or a funeral — and that’s what the book is. We’re all sons of this Mexico that is so complex and violent, but at the same time beautiful.”

The film follows Juan Preciado, one of the illegitimate sons of the titular Pedro Páramo, who just so happens to be related to the book’s author Juan Rulfo. After his mother Doloritas (Ishbel Bautista) dies, Juan travels to the Mexican town of Comala to find his father and meet him for the first time, as per his mother’s deathbed wish. But when he gets there, he finds a literal ghost town, where all of the inhabitants appear real but are actually spectral spirits, many of whom his father killed before his own death. Over the course of the story, the spirits tell Juan the story of his father and of the town, which starts out thriving and prospering but becomes ruins and decay as Pedro Páramo ages and his true pained and violent nature can no longer be hidden. The film stars an all-Mexican main and supporting cast including Dolores Heredia as Dolores’s friend Eduvigues, Ilse Salas as Pedro’s first love Susana San Juan, and Mayra Batalla as the cook Damiana.

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One of the most interesting things about the film was how it starts off quite normal and if you don’t already know the famous tale, you might believe that we’re just watching a movie about Juan, a young man walking through the Mexican desert in search of his father. But as more characters begin to be interwoven, such as Pedro’s servant Fulgor Sedano (Héctor Kotsifakis), it becomes apparent very quickly that nothing is quite what it seems. Not only do we and Juan find out that Pedro is already dead and has been dead for years, but the town is empty and deserted, populated by people who seem dead too.

In fact, for much of the film, you can’t always tell who’s alive and who’s dead, especially when we keep going back and forth between Juan in the present day and Pedro in the past. In both timelines, ghosts appear as solid and real as the living and oftentimes don’t even realize they’re dead. When death does take place on-screen, including one of Pedro’s babies who is born stillborn, it’s over with quickly and without ceremony so no one has time to grieve or linger in their emotions.

The only person who really grieves is ironically Pedro Páramo, who pines for his first love Susana and tries to fill the void of her by sleeping with numerous women throughout the town. But of course, the power dynamic between Pedro as the town’s don and all of the town’s citizens as his subjects makes it so that you’re never quite sure of what sexual relations you see happening on-screen are consensual. In one scene, he even calls a woman “his animal” right after having sex, which shows both how little and how much women take up space and matter in his life and how little he thinks about what humanity, dignity, and agency he’s taking from them. He makes his grief about himself more than the woman he happens to be using that day and even more than Susana, who is driven to madness when she believes that her deceased husband is still alive.

Yet other women are just as complicit in the women’s suffering too. Dorotea (Giovanna Zacaría), a local woman, at some point confesses to the town’s priest her role in trafficking women and bringing them to Pedro, confirming that what we were witnessing all along was rape. But again, there is hardly time for the priest to come to terms with this brutality happening in his town’s congregation before he decides he can’t forgive her and turns her away from the church.

Again and again, we see the impact Pedro has on the town and how he has cost so many people their lives and happiness despite being responsible for their well-being as the don. In his search for power and control, he impregnates numerous women, leaves multiple children childless, marries one woman (Juan’s mother) and abandons her, commits actions that leads to his friends getting murdered or dying, and slowly leads the town to the ruined, empty state that Juan finds it in. In a way, he seems like an angel of death, bringing destruction everywhere he goes.

Even Juan doesn’t live for long in the novel, dying soon after being frightened by a pair of spirits who were brother and sister in the living world and witnessing a man being beaten to death. He shares his afterlife with the rest of the people of Comala, haunting the town and narrating the rest of the film as a spirit who is determined to find out the kind of man his father really was. Because only then can he properly grieve the sudden end of his life and the hard truth about the lineage he comes from, as well as face death head-on.

The film currently has a 76 percent on Rotten Tomatoes with a slightly higher audience score of 79 percent. Clearly, this is a testament to the power of seeing Latinx storytelling and a Latinx-led project most of whom have a connection with the novel, a story so intertwined in Mexican history, and/or Mexico itself. In fact, Gabriel García Márquez often said before his death that Pedro Páramo was what inspired him to write his magum opus One Hundred Years of Solitude, and the novel has inspired many authors who have written in the magical realism genre. Rulfo only ever wrote one novel but its impact is undeniable and this adaptation is an authentic ode to the book.

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