Metacritic-Rezensionen

Pedro Páramo uses its supernatural language to inform the audience of the consequences of a collective wrongdoing. It is also remarkably efficient at communicating different storylines to the audience without making viewers get lost in the process.

The images are vivid, but the storytelling remains elusive and elliptical, exploring the title character from different perspectives without ever pinning him down.

It’s no surprise that the cinematographer’s directorial feature debut is an alluring ghost story full of visual intrigue and surrealist imagery, giving him the space to showcase his strengths while working out some of the storytelling mechanics.

Strangely, given Prieto’s visual acumen, the film is also a bit bland visually, bar a flashy prologue kicked off by the camera sinking into the bowels of the earth. But the story has enough residual power to deliver a dark night of the Mexican soul nonetheless.

Thankfully, its surreal allure — buoyed by a sense of tragic longing — is powerful enough to echo throughout its runtime.

Even when the storytelling falls short, Pedro Páramo never fails to offer up ideas worth pondering.

You’d think the DP would be ready to flex his muscles on his directorial debut, but Pedro Páramo, even with occasional forays into glossy surrealism, can be summed up as prosaic: a project hyper-concerned with respectability and never risking too much in images or narrative.

Prieto also does manage to craft some beautiful images in the flashback sequences. While he doesn't harness his cinematography experience often enough to push the story forward visually, it is impossible to deny the power of certain images.

Where this rich, metaphysical text might have come alive in dreamlike abstraction, Prieto and his screenwriter, Mateo Gil, instead content themselves with a prestige Western on terra firma — grave, good-looking and uninspiring.