Edgar Nito’s rural legend horror flick, A Fisherman’s Tale, opens at dusk with a shot of La Miringua. Her back is turned to us and we’re looking at her from a distance, peering at her through branches of a tree. She is feasting on a goat it looks like, grabbing viscera by the handful. The blood stands out against her stark white skin and hair. This is her (un)natural form, naked and pale as a ghost. She turns to the camera and her pitch black eyes stare back at us, spreading fear into our souls.
The flick is an adaptation of a legend passed down orally from the indigenous Purépecha peoples in the lake regions of Central Mexico, specifically Patzcuaro in the Michoacán state. As we had stated in a festival preview earlier this is a region that a handful of Anarchists, current and former, know very well when we attended the festival while it was held in that town. Personally, a scene later in the movie with La Danza de los Viejitos triggered fond memories of my visit to that region a dozen years ago. The legend itself tells the story of a spirit that takes the form of a woman to lure fishermen into the depths of the lake, where it enchants them. We met no such woman when we were there.
Small town group dynamics mix it up with local superstitions and beliefs in a story about a small fishing community in rural Mexico that is about to get rocked by horror and violence. There is a love triangle made up of two girls who love each and the boy that comes between them. There are constant confrontations between other pairs of siblings that only escalate when one of them is snatched by La Miringua. There is Fede, the lonely fisherman who thinks he has met the woman of his dreams, while another fisherman is ostracized for his insistence that something is wrong in the lake. Apart from the latter, in all these relationships there is an underlying theme of want and desire. Sometimes that comes with icky and uncomfortable discoveries.
Seriously, or jokingly, we have to ask, who is the Mexican equivalent of William Shakespeare? A Fisherman’s Tale appears to have all the dynamics of a Shakespearean drama, set in small town rural Mexico. It has forbidden love and jealous lovers. Squabbling siblings and townspeople. A mythical creature stirs up trouble for the locals. There is so much going on in this seemingly small film, with so many characters at play here, we realized that we should have made a flow chart just to keep track of everyone.
The story has a free flowing narrative which is admittedly a test for any cinephile to undertake as well (see need for a flow chart). With so many characters and dynamics in the mix we admit to having lost track of who was who and why everyone was seemingly angry with everyone else, until we reached the climax and then it became a little clearer who was miffed with whom. Then came the knives.
The natural, free flowing narrative lulls you into a state of calm. Having given up on trying to keep track of everything happening to everyone you just settle in for the ride. The soft tones and natural light make it easier to settle back into the pocket after random acts of suspense and horror punctuate the earlier narrative. Nito also shot their film as naturalistic as possible, opting for as much natural light as was available. Shot with a traditional aspect ratio with soft tones there is something very classic about how A Fisherman’s Tale looks. It also makes some of those early romantic scenes feel more intimate, almost intrusive. That we’re allowed to peer in on something very special.
It’s what also makes the final act such a staggering conclusion to this story, surprising and inevitable. Our senses have not been completely dulled to acts of violence but what happens here feels so personal and so tragic that we could only respond to what we were looking at with a softly spoken, “woah”, by the end. Proof that the film… got its hooks in us.
We could also not bring this review to a close without a shout out to Leondardo Heiblum, Nicolas Garcia Liberman, Emiliano Gonzalez de Leon and Odilon Chavez for the film’s haunting, challenging score.
A bit of a challenge to track at times the story of A Fisherman’s Tale becomes clearer by the end. Paths towards tragedy start from the very beginning and are only exacerbated by the involvement of La Miringua. What we do to ourselves does not always need the help of a mythical lake creature but it definitely makes it more entertaining.