With his previous feature, 2019's La Llorona, Guatemalan writer/director Jayro Bustamente employed the titular Latin-American folk legend to examine a dark chapter in his country's history - the "Silent Holocaust", a decades long genocide of the nation's Mayan people. With Rita he similarly employs dark fantasy elements to highlight a shameful event in Guatemala's more recent past.
In 2017, 41 young girls died in a fire at a children's shelter on the outskirts of Guatemala City. As punishment for attempting to escape the shelter, 55 girls were crammed into a room and denied access to food or toiletries. In protest the girls set fire to a mattress, hoping this would force the guards to set them free. Instead, they were left to burn, with only 15 girls making it out alive. Given the rampant accusations of abuse at the shelter, many suspect the girls were purposely left to perish to prevent them from speaking out.
In Bustamente's reimagining of the events leading to the tragedy, we see the shelter through the eyes of 13-year-old Rita (Giuliana Santa Cruz). Having fled her abusive father and indifferent mother, Rita was picked up by the authorities and sent to a "shelter," which quickly reveals itself as having more in common with a prison. Bustamente makes the unconventional choice of opting for an ultra narrow 2.75:1 aspect ratio, which would usually enhance a feeling of openness but here only serves to highlight the walls that entrap our young heroine, always visible on both sides of the frame. On her first night in the institution Rita is beaten by the other "inmates" of her cramped dorm. But the other girls are the least of Rita's worries, as she quickly learns of the sexual abuse and trafficking the children are subjected to. As she befriends the other girls in her dorm, Rita finds herself at the centre of a plot to escape and expose the horrors of the shelter to the outside world.
Through Rita's eyes the shelter takes on magic realist elements. In her imagination it's a place filled with "fantastic beings", like the X-Men's School for Gifted Youngsters. There are elements of Peter Pan with Bustamente swapping out the Lost Boys for this group of lost girls. In the manner of Clueless and Mean Girls, we get an early scene where Rita first walks through the shelter and observes how the girls have arranged themselves into specific cliques, each one boasting an elaborate aesthetic like a feminised version of the gangs of Walter Hill's The Warriors (in a portent of doom, the members of the "gang" Rita ends up joining all sport angel wings). Lurking on the outskirts of the shelter are ghosts of the girls who didn't make it out alive, looking a lot like the sort of spirits you might find in a classic Japanese horror movie but surrounded by sparkling lights like Peter Pan's Tinkerbell.
Such fantastical elements are arguably necessary, as to play the real life horrors in all their grounded grisliness would likely make Rita a deeply unpalatable experience that many viewers would struggle to make it through. As it is, there are some intensely disturbing scenes here. The abuse is mercifully never visualised but Bustamente finds ways to make it clear exactly what daily horrors his young heroines are forced to endure. His editing also ensures his child actors weren't exposed to any of the awful details of the abuse suffered by their less fortunate real life counterparts: in the film's most unsettling scene we see Rita's POV as a female photographer attempts to coerce her into striking suggestive poses for a trafficking "catalogue."
Along with the abusive male guards there are women who enable their crimes, represented by a monitor (Sabrina De La Hoz) who seems to have occasional pangs of guilt she refuses to act upon, and a witch-like social worker (Margarita Kenéfic) who specialises in manipulative victim-blaming, horrifically attempting to goad Rita into accepting responsibility for her father's abuse. Bustamente is keen to point the finger of blame at the entire adult world that has failed girls like Rita, for whom there is sadly no fairy-tale ending.
Rita is available on Shudder
Directed by: Jayro Bustamente
Starring: Giuliana Santa Cruz, Alejandra Vasquez, Ángela Quevedo, Isabel Aldana, Sabrina De La Hoz, Margarita Kénefic, Maria Telón
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