RITA - Mark Reviews Movies

Rita, Shudder

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 21, 2024

Inspired by a horrific true story but resistant to reality, Rita tells the story of a so-called "safe home" in Guatemala, where the neglect and abuse of multiple children resulted in a tragedy that could not be ignored. Writer/director Jayro Bustamante clearly has his heart in the right place, bringing more attention to both the systematic failings of this institution and the innocent lives that were forced to endure them, but the filmmaker's approach, which imagines that story as a twisted fairy tale of sorts, doesn't match the importance of the story he's trying to tell.

The resulting movie becomes stranger than it is terrifying. It follows Rita (Giuliana Santa Cruz), a new arrival at the safe home. It houses children of assorted ages and on the edges of society. Some are orphans. Others are victims of abuse at home, and all of them are displaced in some way. Rita, we learn, was sexually abused by her father, resulting in a pregnancy.

Her boss Celia (María Telón), with whom the girl has been living and whom she sees as more of a mother than her own, arranged an abortion for Rita. After the procedure, there were complications, leading Rita to go to a hospital and, without any parent or legal guardian she would want to contact, to become a ward of the state.

The place is awful—dirty, overcrowded, run more like a prison than a care facility. In some opening narration, Rita explains that she never bought into fairy tales, but her stay in this place has forced her to reconsider, if only to keep all of the terrible realities of it at bay.

The movie does keep them at bay to an extent, too—too much so, perhaps. Soon enough, the institution becomes home to divided classes of pre-teen and teenaged girls, pretending to be or, in some cases, actually existing as assorted mythical entities. There's a group of fairies, who wear sparkly wings, and Rita becomes part of a gang of angels, donning feathery wings and led by Terca (Isabel Aldana), whose black feathers make her stand out from the rest of the group. They haze Rita upon her arrival in their ward, although Rita later discovers that the bruises from her beating were meant to protect her in a way.

That's because some of the guards run a sex trafficking ring out of the facility. The bruises keep them from taking photos of Rita for the time being, but it doesn't stop those guards who would and do abuse the girls who are supposed to be under their care.

One understands Bustamante's hesitation to present this material in a straightforward, realistic manner. The very idea of it is overwhelming enough without any depictions of the kind of abuse these girls face in the narrative and their real-life counterparts faced in reality. The focus here isn't on the abuse either, after all. It's more about the psychological angle of Rita and her fellow residents attempting to escape the harsh reality of their situation—before coming up with a plan to make an actual, physical escape from the facility. Rita agrees to participate, because she has a younger sister she wants to rescue from her father.

How the psychological angle is presented here, though, somewhat diminishes the agency and realism of these characters. While some of them have stories to tell (such as Ángela Quevedo's Sulmy and Alejandra Vásquez's Bebé) and rebellious fights to take to the guards (such as pouring urine under the door when the guards lock up the Angels in their dormitory), there is an otherworldly sense to the girls' existence, especially as the lines between fantasy and reality increasingly blur when the escape plan starts to become more than a plan.

In particular, there's one group of children in the facility, wearing black veils and strings of lights that also hover around their bodies, who seem to be the ghosts of those who have died in this place. These spirits certainly don't have stories of their own, apart from rumors about forced abortions and a death by suicide, and their haunting appearances when Rita is at her most despairing make them seem more like a plot device than anything else. They even provide our protagonist with a mystical knife in case she needs it to defend herself from William (Ernesto Molina Samperio), a guard who keeps harassing her.

As the horrors of the facility and the final tragedy of the girls' attempt to free themselves from those abuses come to light, it's obvious that this is an important told, in need of being told. Bustamante tells it with an admirable degree of sympathy for and solidarity with the girls at the heart of Rita, but those feelings can only go so far within the particular way the filmmaker decides to tell this tale. The fantasy elements add such a degree of distance that the movie doesn't do justice to the cruel reality of this scenario.

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