Aunt Alejandra

When the grandmother dies, Aunt Alejandra moves into the house of her nephew Rodolfo. It is an ordinary middle-class Mexican household: Rodolfo, his wife Lucía and three children. The family takes her in warmly. But the older children, Malena and Andrés, mock the old woman and make her life difficult. Alejandra grows close to the youngest, Martita, and starts teaching her things. The woman really is a witch. The children who mocked her die one after another, and the house comes apart from inside. Arturo Ripstein directs this Mexican film of ninety-eight minutes, with Isabela Corona as Alejandra and Diana Bracho as Lucía. Ripstein rarely worked in horror, and what he is describing here is not the supernatural but the cruelty inside one family.