“Pedro Páramo” is not the kind of movie you’d expect to be the directorial debut of the cinematographer who shot “Barbie” — unless you know that that cinematographer, Rodrigo Prieto, also shot “Killers of the Flower Moon,” “Silence,” “Babel,” “21 Grams” and many other films that studiously avoid hot pink in any and all forms.
Rodrigo has been one of the most prolific and adventurous cinematographers of recent years (including, not to be dismissive, the well-shot “Barbie”), and if he’s drawing inspiration from any of the directors he worked for, it’s probably Iñárritu. “Pedro Páramo,” which had its world premiere on Saturday at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, carries echoes of “Bardo” in the fact that it is simultaneously personal and mystical.
Drawing on family memories of the Mexican Revolution that embroiled his grandparents, summoning up universal thoughts of the guilt that can be passed down through generations, the adaptation of Juan Rulfo’s 1955 novel of prototype magical realism is gorgeously shot — partly in deep darkness and shadow, partly in scorching desert sunlight. The images are vivid, but the storytelling remains elusive and elliptical, exploring the title character from different perspectives without ever pinning him down.
At first, Pedro Páramo is a question more than a person. A middle-aged man named Juan Preciado (Tenoch Huerta) walks across the desert in a suit in the 1930s, looking for the town of Comala; his late mother has sent him there to find his father, Pedro Páramo, but it’s not a family reunion she envisioned. “For the neglect he showed us, son, make him pay,” she says.
Preciado gets to Comala with the help of a man walking through the desert alongside a pair of donkeys; when asked if he knows who Páramo is, the man replies, “a living rancor,” and says that Páramo is his father, too.
But Páramo isn’t a living anything. When Preciado gets to Comala, he learns that the man is dead and so, essentially, is the town.
Still, a woman who seems to run some kind of boarding house is waiting for him with an attic room conspicuously missing a bed. She knew he was coming, she says, because his mother told her.
“My mother is dead,” he says, confused.
“Oh,” she says. “That’s why her voice was so faint.”
But before any further explanations are offered, the film flashes back to a town that is green rather than brown, and a young girl that moves away and leaves a lovestruck boy behind. He seems too idealistic for this place, and we think he’s the younger version of Preciado. But he’s not; he’s a young Páramo, with a backstory of ruthless ambition fueled by heartbreak proceeding in fits and starts, in between dispatches from Comala.
In what passes for the present, the town is full of ghostly presences, and it’s possible that the whole place is little more than a halfway house for the dead. That makes it the ideal point of departure for a film that itself slides along the line between life and afterlife. “You can’t imagine the crowd of souls that roam the street,” Preciado is told — but he doesn’t have to imagine them, because at times he can see them.
The story grows stranger and more hallucinatory as it goes along, and Preciado, our entry point into this world, essentially disappears as the story settles on Páramo himself. We see his rise to power, the way he saved himself from bankruptcy by marrying into the richest family in town before sending his wife away.
The grown Páramo looks like a mild-mannered guy, but he’s vicious and underhanded while still obsessed with his childhood girlfriend, who eventually returns as a grown woman, aged and worn and dazed.
It’s a dreamy meditation on loss and longing curdling into hatred, and on evil deeds that set things in motion that will devour everyone, even Páramo. He makes deals with the revolutionaries who overrun Mexico and he calls for mourning that turns into partying that even he can’t control. The movie slips through time in ways that can be lyrical or infuriating, ways that at times probably needed a more experienced director in control.
But as “Pedro Páramo” veers all over the place, uniting the good and the evil in a strange dance of life and death, there’s not much to do except relax and immerse yourself in Prieto’s curious vision.
“Pedro Páramo” will be released by Netflix.
