Pedro Paramo (2024) 'Netflix' Movie Review: Too Safe to Be This Ambitious (2024)

Mexican cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto has been plying his creative trade in Hollywood for over two decades. His notably instrumental camerawork can be seen in most of Martin Scorsese’s latest works and Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie.” For his directorial debut, Prieto, however, follows in the footsteps of his earlier collaborator, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. “Pedro Paramo” (2024) is a landmark novel in Latin American literature. One that influenced Gabriel Garcia Marquez to create another, relatively popular, landmark literary work, “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” The novel is one of the early proponents of the artistic phenomenon known as “Magic Realism.”

In “Pedro Paramo,” Juan Preciado (Tenoch Huerta) travels to the abandoned ruins of what once was a bustling town called Comala. Juan was conceived in this place, as this is the place where his father, the eponymous Pedro Paramo (Manuel Garcia Rulfo), lived and ruled. Pedro abandoned Juan’s mother, Dolores (Ishbel Bautista). On her deathbed, she had Juan promise her this trip to find his father. To find Pedro and return the hateful apathy and neglect. However, Juan’s tryst with the ‘Ghost Town’ does not materialize as the way he might have expected. For starters, Pedro has been dead for a long time.

In his quest in Comala, Juan meets with many characters. Spectral characters seeped in loneliness and ruins. With each encounter, he learns more about his father. The cruelty of the man, as well as the quest for love Pedro was on his entire life. He learns about the ghosts, or the ‘echoes of the past,’ that have become the fate of the town’s inhabitants. The residents of this town are neither alive nor truly resting in peace. For all of them still long. The cumulative longing of the residents has made Comala a place hovering on the borders of the afterlife. It is neither here nor there.

The world of “Magic Realism” is neither magical (like a fantasy) nor does it reflect the facets of our ‘true’ reality. The delicate line between ‘magic’ and ‘realism’ is key for all good artistic works experimenting with the same. Written by Juan Rulfo, the magic realism of “Pedro Paramo” (the novel) is further accelerated towards abstractism with its notoriously fragmented narrative. The nuances of such an ambitious story are perhaps even more difficult to capture visually than textually. For Rodrigo Prieto, to choose such a challenging text to frame with his camera, is a boldly ambitious choice, considering it is his first time directing.

However, despite the visually enriching effort, the challenge becomes overwhelming. With a screenplay by Mateo Gil, “Pedro Paramo” lacks the imaginative kick that the metaphysical context of its source text sorely demands. Prieto often has to rely on dialogues and the fine acting of his ensemble cast to tell us about the cruelty and hypocrisy of Pedro Paramo and the men of his times. The depiction is safe and follows the text, but it lacks the boldness that Prieto’s choice of adaptation showed. The film had its moments in certain phases, especially when Juan was trying to make sense of his many ghostly encounters in the undead town. After Juan’s death, the film veers towards becoming a biography. It takes the enigma out of the man and becomes a biopic of a ruthless landowner named Pedro Paramo.

Manuel Garcia Rulfo is superlative as the adult version of “Pedro Paramo.” He is ruthlessly commanding, cunningly manipulative, and poignantly sad in equal measures. The moment where Pedro sees his old kite burning, a Rosebud-from-Citizen-Kane moment if you like, the pain in his eyes would make the audience feel a tiny bit of sympathy, despite the character deserving none of it. In other roles, Ilse Salas as the thoroughly tormented Susana, Pedro’s childhood and one true love, is a revelation. With much of the story revolving around the afterlife, with the characters’ constant fear of hell and desire for heaven, Salas’ Susana’s total defiance of that is one of the film’s shiniest moments.

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