Plot Summary
Pedro Páramo is a magical realist drama adaptation of Juan Rulfo’s 1955 novel, directed by Rodrigo Prieto, follows a man named Juan Preciado who visits the lush, green rural town of Comala from his mother’s memories to find his father, fulfilling his mother’s dying wish: “make him pay for all those years he put us out of his mind.”
What’s the reality of Comala?
Unlike his mother’s memories of a vibrant and lush Comala, where she spent her childhood before Pedro sent her away to live with her sister, Juan arrives to find Comala desolate—a ghost town where spirits walk and whisper. Comala is not only a ghost town but also the only trace left of a past plagued by violence and death.
What’s the significance of the mud lady?
After staying a while in Comala with the ghost of his mother’s friend Eduviges Dyada, and leaving the house in sheer fright at the screaming voices in the attic of the man Pedro had killed to usurp his land, Juan comes across a sibling couple with whom he stays the night.
In the morning, the woman invites Juan to sleep with her on the bed due to the ticks on the floor, but she soon transforms into a bubbling goo of mud, eventually frightening Juan to his death.
While we do not come across the woman and her brother in the original plot, the symbolism is mostly about the immorality that plagued the town. In the book, we have more context about the woman and her brother’s incestuous relationship, which manifests in the film as the woman’s dissolution into mud—a bubbling goo of impurity and immorality.
What happens to Juan at the end?
After his encounter with the mud lady, Juan rushes to the town square, where he sees a spiraling mass of naked persons in the sky. This extends the idea of the town’s plague of immorality but also signifies Juan’s nearing death.
Throughout the second half of the film, Juan has been dead and is speaking with the vagrant woman Dorotea, who often brought women for Pedro Páramo. She later tells him the entire story about Pedro and Susana San Juan, Pedro’s only love, and their eventual deaths. By the end of the film, we find Dorotea and Juan lying dead across from each other in the film.
What happened to Pedro Páramo at the end?
Pedro Páramo, a farmer, had become a landowner by every means possible—killing, buying, bribing, and more. Initially under a huge debt passed down from his parents, he married Juan’s mother to waive the debt he owed her and also to become the owner of her fortune. At the same time, he had his neighbor killed by his henchmen and usurped his land. Gradually, he gained authoritarian control over the entire town.
He even survived a revolutionary attack by bribing them. Just when it seemed Pedro had everything, things began to go south with the arrival of Pedro’s childhood love, Susana. Susana had been suffering and grieving since the death of her husband, which eventually leads her to her deathbed while being Pedro’s last wife.
After Susana’s death, bells toll in the city square for days to announce her departure, but eventually, people begin festivities, mistaking it as a celebration. Pedro swears revenge, and the town slowly dies as people move away and supplies stop. Pedro spends his days like a lifelike corpse, sitting and staring out into the wild.
On a fateful day, one of his illegitimate children, a drunk Abundio Martínez—the man Juan met at the beginning of the film, in search of help for his dying wife—stabs Pedro to death when Pedro refuses to help him.