Rita is the kind of “fantasy” where the only magical creature you really believe in is a functioning child-protection system—because clearly that belongs in the realm of make-believe.
Jayro Bustamante, the Guatemalan director behind La Llorona, returns with a dark fairytale that crawls under your skin and then politely rearranges your bones. Inspired by the 2017 Guatemalan orphanage fire, in which dozens of girls died after being locked inside by the very state meant to protect them, Rita uses monsters and magic not to escape reality but to stare it down until reality flinches.
It’s also, somehow, a beautiful, strangely hopeful movie about rage, friendship, and the tiny superpowers traumatized girls give each other just to survive. You know. Cozy stuff.
A Fairy Tale Told with Teeth
Thirteen-year-old Rita (Giuliana Santa Cruz) runs away from her abusive father and briefly finds warmth in a diner run by a kind woman—one of the film’s very few adults who isn’t terrible. That fragile safety doesn’t last. The state swoops in, “for her protection,” and deposits her in an all-girls institution that’s supposed to be a safe house and looks suspiciously like a low-budget branch of hell.
Inside, Rita discovers a micro-society of girls who talk about prophecies and angels and plan their escape like a militant improv troupe. They believe she’s the one they’ve been waiting for—the spark that will finally help them burn this place down, figuratively and maybe literally. The staff, styled as witches and demons in the girls’ imagination, are your usual state carers: cruel, petty, and very invested in making sure children never confuse “institutional protection” with “being treated like a human being.”
Bustamante keeps one foot in social realism and the other in full-blown fantasy. The girls see themselves as super-powered, the guardians as literal monsters; the film never completely confirms or denies how much of that is “real.” It’s a magic-realist tightrope where the fantasy is less an escape hatch and more a weapon—if you’re going to be trapped in a prison, you might as well turn it into a myth where you get to be the hero.
Grim and Gorgeous
If you’re going to make a movie this heavy, you’d better make it look good. Fortunately, Rita is downright ravishing while it’s ruining you. Inti Briones’s cinematography won the top prize at Fantasia, and you can see why: the images are composed like dark storybook panels, full of shadowy corridors, candlelit conspiracies, and bursts of color that feel like they were smuggled in behind the guards’ backs.
Critics have called the film “bleak but also beautiful” and “a rich tapestry of truth and fable,” and that’s dead on—sometimes literally. Bustamante loves wide frames and deep focus; he often stages scenes so the girls look tiny in the architecture, then flips it and uses the same widescreen canvas to make them look like an army. The contrast between fairy-tale composition and institutional ugliness is constant: concrete walls shot like castle battlements, barred windows glowing like portals.
Some have argued that the ultra-wide aspect ratio borders on showy, especially given most people will watch this on Shudder at home and not in a giant festival theater. Fair. But even on a smaller screen, there’s a sense that the film is too big for its environment—which, frankly, is also true of the girls.
The Kids Are Not Alright—But They’re Incredible
Bustamante cast almost entirely nonprofessional girls from across Guatemala, and it’s a gamble that pays off obscenely well.
Giuliana Santa Cruz’s Rita is the still point at the center of all this chaos—watchful, wounded, and smarter than everyone in charge of her life. She doesn’t play Rita as a plucky victim or a saintly martyr; she’s furious, exhausted, sometimes selfish, and always thinking three moves ahead. It’s the kind of performance that makes you hope this teenager has a good agent and a better therapist.
Her cellmates—Sulmi, Bebé, La Terca, Gladys—each have their own flavor of defiance or fragility, and the film gives them enough personality that when things escalate, you’re not just remembering them as “the shy one” or “the funny one.” Several reviewers have singled out how authentic their group dynamic feels: alliances, petty fights, ride-or-die loyalty that springs up without warning. It’s like watching a super-bleak version of The Breakfast Club where Saturday detention is replaced by state-sanctioned trauma.
The adults, by contrast, are deliberately more archetypal: abusive fathers, indifferent police, sadistic monitors. Rita’s father is barely on screen and still manages to feel like an earthquake; Ernestina and the other staff might as well have “systemic failure” stitched on their uniforms.
Horror in the System, Not the Supernatural
If you’re coming to Rita for jump scares or creature feature antics, you’ve read the wrong syllabus. The horror here is mostly human: locked doors, negligent governments, adults who treat children as disposable line items in a budget. The fantasy elements—prophecies, powers, witches, demons—are a delivery system for truths that would otherwise be unwatchable.
Reviewers have compared this approach to Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth and The Devil’s Backbone, but Bustamante is playing a tougher game: instead of using fantasy around distant historical trauma, he’s grappling with a real atrocity from just a few years ago, in the same country, with survivors still alive.
That could so easily go wrong—exploitative, mawkish, or pornographically grim. Instead, the film channels its anger outward: the target isn’t the girls’ suffering, it’s the structures that enable it. One critic called Rita “haunting and fiercely political,” another praised it as one of the most impactful depictions of child abuse in recent cinema, and they’re not exaggerating.
Dark humor in this context has to be careful, and the film mostly leaves the jokes to us cynical viewers. But there is a kind of bitter wit in how it portrays the bureaucracy—every time someone insists the institution is “for their own good,” you can practically hear the universe laughing in lawsuit.
Not Quite a Perfect Spell
For all its power, Rita isn’t flawless. Some viewers have found the pacing deliberate to the point of drag, especially in the middle stretch where the girls’ fantasy language risks feeling repetitive before the plot fully detonates.
Others have questioned whether some of the more stylized choices—the ultra-wide frame, the occasional flare of symbolism—tip over into art-house showboating that slightly distances us from the girls rather than immersing us.
But honestly, these feel like quibbles next to what the film gets right. If the worst thing you can say about a movie is “it’s a bit too ambitious and sometimes trips over its own metaphors,” that’s a problem I wish more horror had.
A Bedtime Story for When You Never Want to Sleep Again
In the end, Rita is a dark fairy tale in the oldest sense: a story told to warn you that the forest is full of wolves, and several of them hold government positions.
It’s harrowing, yes. But it’s also full of small, stubborn moments of beauty—girls braiding each other’s hair like war paint, whispered conspiracies under thin blankets, the way a single act of collective refusal can feel more magical than any spell. In a genre that often uses children as props, Rita lets them be protagonists, strategists, and, when necessary, avenging angels.
If you have a high tolerance for emotionally brutal stories and a soft spot for horror that actually means something, this is an essential watch. If you prefer your fantasy lighter and your institutions trustworthy… well, first of all, I envy your optimism, and second, Rita will destroy it in about 20 minutes.
Either way, this is one of those films that lingers. Long after the credits roll, you’re not thinking about witches and demons. You’re thinking about courtrooms, social workers, and how many real-life girls never got the chance to turn their story into a revolution.
As dark fantasies go, Rita doesn’t just cast a spell—it hands you the match and politely points at the nearest orphanage-shaped powder keg.
