Rita Is Wondrous Dark Fantasy, In Tribute of Horrifying Reality

It’s a delicate proposition, to approach a story of real-life horror and shocking depravity through the lens of fantastical parable. Such a road is one that the likes of Guillermo del Toro are known for walking, although in the case of stories such as Pan’s Labyrinth or The Devil’s Backbone, the Mexican master of horror and fantasy crafts his tales around fictional people suffering on the fringes of real-world historical conflicts, rather than directly adapting ripped-from-the-headlines cases of recent tragedy. The latter makes for a significantly more difficult assignment in finding a tone that doesn’t come off as lacking in dignity, which is part of the task tackled by Guatemalan filmmaker Jayro Bustamante in his newly released Rita, a harrowing dark fantasy/horror hybrid that centers around a real-life incident involving the deaths of more than 40 young girls in the country only seven years ago. Bustamante ultimately succeeds in his intention to highlight the inhuman suffering foisted on vulnerable girls via the country’s broken Social Welfare framework, even as he skirts the boundaries of decorousness in telling their story and indulges in some visual showiness that simultaneously amplifies and arguably detracts from his thesis. What remains is a visually sumptuous and evocative, but uneven feature.

Bustamante has ventured into this kind of territory previously, most recently via 2019’s well-received La Llorona, (not to be confused with the same year’s The Curse of La Llorona) which coupled the pervasive, ghostly urban legend of the Spanish-speaking world with a story about the countless indigenous people murdered or forcibly disappeared during the brutal Guatemalan Civil War. Rita, on the other hand, takes a far more recent inspiration: A 2017 incident in which a fire at a decrepit “safe home” or orphanage claimed the lives of 41 girls between the ages of 14-17, all of whom had been confined in a single room following a mass escape attempt the previous day. The film is told from the eyes of one of these girls, newcomer Rita, who enters the “safe house” system as a result of abuse, only to find even more systematic, dehumanizing treatment waiting for her there.

The title character is played with grace and fortitude by Giuliana Santa Cruz, and we learn before long that she ended up an inmate–because this place is assuredly a prison rather than a home–at the orphanage following a hospital admission, which was necessary as a result of a life-threatening abortion. Impregnated by her own abusive father, Rita had run away from home and been taken in by a kind woman, but removed from her custody by the state, following the hospital admission thanks to a bureaucracy that refused to return her to someone who wasn’t her biological parent. Quickly acclimating to the clique-based prison hierarchy, Rita is taken in by the “Angels,” a gang of girls occupying one dormitory-like room who all wear angel’s wings of varying size and shape, seemingly designating their rank. She befriends the likes of Sulmi (Ángela Joana Quevedo) and Bebé (Alejandra Vásquez Carrillo), while slowly earning the attention of clique leader La Terca (André Sebastián Aldana), whose jet black wings give her the air of a dangerous fallen angel, in a nice bit of production design.

From the moment she arrives, though, Rita experiences oddities and expressionistic, fantastical touches at the facility–and not just in the form of the other groups of costumed young girls, which include the likes of princesses, she-wolves, bunnies, fairies and more. She begins to see black-veiled apparitions of girls surrounded by blinking, firefly-like lights, entities referred to as “The Stars,” a gang of girls who may or may not be the ghosts of those who have died at the orphanage previously. Storm clouds are conjured up in the dorm room above her head, wreathing the Angels in an outward manifestation of their own inner turmoil. It’s visually sumptuous, but difficult to parse all at once–it’s never quite clear if what we’re seeing is something that the other characters are all meant to be able to perceive as well, or if certain visuals are only for the audience’s benefit. The simplest assumption, that this is all just a manifestation of Rita’s psyche or imagination as a way of dealing with this horrible place, is quickly tossed out the window when it becomes clear that the adult guards can not only also see and interact with potentially incorporeal entities like The Stars, but don’t even seem particularly surprised to encounter them. A layer of supernatural energy just seems to be suffused into this place, to the point that it has become an accepted hazard of its day-to-day operation. Rita takes place in a more mystically charged version of our own reality–I’ve seen others describe this as “magical realism,” but in this context it’s not really particularly grounded in the way magical realism requires. “Dark fantasy” is a better catch-all term for how intensely the supernatural elements pervade this story, in a less subtle and more up front way than in the likes of say, Guillermo del Toro’s work.

These visuals, which are Rita‘s primary calling card, are complicated to some degree by the choice of the director and cinematographer to shoot the film in an extremely wide 2.76:1 aspect ratio, narrowing the frame by a huge degree. The effect is clearly meant to induce claustrophobia, and it certainly does that, but it simultaneously compresses the image to a point that becomes stifling–it feels like you’re spying on the characters through slats in a horizontal backyard fence. Such a wide aspect ratio is meant to be viewed on a massive IMAX-style screen, which would probably help Rita play its best, but given the straight-to-Shudder release, the film is far more likely to be viewed on smaller screens, and it simply doesn’t work as well in this context, making the viewer feel like they need to get physically close to the screen in hopes of best appreciating the subtleties of its visual details, particularly in darker scenes. I feel bad for the inevitable person who ends up watching this on their phone; they will absolutely be missing some of its genuinely attractive imagery. I can’t help but perceive the decision as an embrace of an overly showy aesthetic choice that doesn’t amount to much in practice–the film doesn’t need this particular type of odd visual iconoclasm in order to be effective, and it reads as borderline pretentious.

Regardless, as the prisoners of this social system engage in acts of futile, symbolic rebellion, Bustamante’s screenplay does a fine job of drawing you into the workings of their women-in-prison-style world, where there’s always threat of potential sexual violence, and dreams of glorious revolution and escape. It’s not quite Female Prisoner Scorpion levels of depicted brutality, but it’s plenty sobering given the ages of everyone involved. There are absolutely no adult allies here; not the administration and not even the witch-like prison social worker, who after meeting Rita seems to suggest that she not only wanted her father’s sexual advances but was also jealous of her father eventually turning his evil intentions toward her younger sister. The film is at its strongest as it builds the sorority of trust and support between those girls who are incarcerated there together, captured in its more subtle moments–the knowing glances exchanged between girls who have all experienced way too much and understand the emotions each other are processing on a deep level, even when specific parts of their trauma are left unsaid.

Together, the girls plot to escape in grand fashion and tell the stories of their abuses to the media in an effort to bring the place down, though Rita builds such distrust in authority that one has to wonder if anyone would care about their abuse, even if they succeeded. The film hits its peak in the midst of this escape, reveling in the dreamlike cinematography of groups of the winged Angels escaping into the woods, bounding like unchained animals, evocative of something like Beasts of the Southern Wild. It’s genuinely heartbreaking to then watch the escape attempt fall short, their brief joy kneecapped by brutal reality as the girls are captured and rounded up one by one. We know from the news story that inspired the film that their quest can’t succeed, but that doesn’t make it any less devastating in the moment.

Which leads, of course, to the headlines from which Rita was ripped. I had some concerns here, watching the film, of whether Bustamante had sensationalized the all-too-real account of the deaths of 40 girls in a fire at the facility–especially watching that tragedy play out, little hands pounding on the door while security on the opposite side refuses to allow them to escape even as girls begin dying in the chaos. Surely, I thought, this is amplifying the villainy of the orphanage administration and security for cinematic effect. Surely, things didn’t actually occur in a way at all similar to this. But in doing research afterward, the truth of the incident, from the mouths of the survivors themselves, backs up Bustamante’s depiction–both in terms of the abuse leading up to the incident, and the outright refusal of authority figures in that moment to save the girls’ lives, which resulted in a number of arrests and criminal charges in the days that followed. Whether those charges ever led to trials or verdicts is something I can’t yet determine, but it is clear one can’t accuse Bustamante of exaggerating the level of evil inherent in this story: Humanity already provided more than what would have been necessary.

Rita is a harrowing experience, a story that highlights the depths of depravity in the human spirit, softening it only slightly via its use of evocative dark fantasy visuals to frame the efforts of its young characters to rise above our collective lack of empathy. For many viewers, it will rank among the year’s most memorable but sobering genre films.

Director: Jayro Bustamante
Writer: Jayro Bustamante
Stars: Giuliana Santa Cruz, Ángela Joana Quevedo, Alejandra Vásquez Carrillo, André Sebastián Aldana
Release date: Nov. 22, 2024 (Shudder)

Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter for more film writing.