Magical realism meets a grand family saga in “Pedro Páramo,” the directorial debut of cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto. Prieto, who is responsible for the lighting and lenses of countless hit films including “Barbie,” “Killers of the Flower Moon” and “Brokeback Mountain,” takes a sharp look at one of Mexico’s most influential novels. A tale about ghosts and memories slipping through time, Mateo Gil’s screenplay follows the structure of Juan Rulfo’s 1955 text with strict fidelity, laying the groundwork for a melancholy (if slightly uneven) adaptation that finds visual splendor in horror.

Tenoch Huerta (“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”) stars as Juan Preciado, who travels to his late mother’s hometown of Comala some time after the Revolution (1910-20) in search of the father he never met, a man named Pedro Páramo. He soon learns that the person he learned (Manuel García Rulfo) is also dead. The missing figure’s name is spoken in full multiple times before we encounter him in a flashback, as if he were a figure of legend.

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When he arrives in Comala, an eerie, deserted municipality with cobblestone roads, Juan encounters various people who once knew his parents and begin telling him stories by candlelight. But the line between the living and the dead in this town is razor-thin, and it soon turns out that many conversations are encounters with spirits who initially fail to understand their true nature.

As each story about Juan’s father comes to light, the film moves seamlessly into the late 19th century and the very early 20th century; sometimes in the same frame. The camera shifts between rooms revealing different decades as the dead streets and dreary walls of Comala come to life with vibrant tones and the surrounding greenery is revealed. As the film moves back and forth and Juan learns about his father from multiple sources, Pedro Páramo’s gang story comes to light in a non-linear way through the gentle placement of puzzle pieces.

The picture in question is gripping and ugly. Pedro is a powerful man who has influence over the local population and has brutal bandits at his disposal, and he moves easily from woman to woman for both personal and political reasons. One of these women was Juan’s mother, Dolores (Ishbel Bautista). However, the love of Pedro’s life was a completely different character; Susana (Ilse Salas), whom he met in his youth and whose return to Comala he had been waiting for many years, was a feeling of longing fully embodied by Gustavo Santaolalla’s powerful music.

Tragedy and self-destructive inevitability dominate Pedro’s story; It’s as if the pain he spreads across the world is lying in wait before coming back to haunt him through twisted cosmic justice. His only son, Miguel (Santiago Colores), whom he knew legitimately, dies young in a riding accident, but not before forcing himself on a young girl, raising the looming question of whether Pedro deserves his pain. As Juan absorbs these anecdotes throughout the night, he moves from building to building and street to street, at first passively listening to other people’s memories, but eventually watching scenes from the past played out in doorways, as if sitting inside an old movie. This should not be secret.

It all adds up to the Shakespearean tragedy of a man lost in selfish ambitions and personal desires, the forces of greed and love that often conflict and disturb his soul. Along the way, the film uses its back-and-forth structure to confuse established conventions of storytelling, shifting the narrative’s perspective with surprising abandon, just as Rulfo once did in his novel. Unfortunately, such a transition is so definitive that, when it occurs halfway through, it almost permanently drags the film into the past, leaving it unable to take advantage of the strangeness of the post-1920s setting in which the storytellers materialize before drifting in and out. their physical environment, whether land or sky.

These imaginary events, supported by the disconnected sound design that deeply affects the audience, are limited to the first half of the film. Pedro’s “Godfather”-like epic is certainly compelling, and every performance is powerful and operatic, but the film loses at least some of its initial zest the longer it lingers with the title character, without returning to the dreamlike frame. The introductory scenes are magnificently disorienting, between focus (and lack of focus) that doesn’t follow traditional background and foreground conventions (Prieto doubles as his own cinematographer, sharing duties with Nico Aguilar) and environments that seem to shift so subtly that they don’t follow traditional background and foreground rules (Prieto doubles as his own cinematographer, sharing duties with Nico Aguilar). stitching and gnawing at the subconscious.

Even though the film eventually gets lost in itself, taking on a more classical cinematic form that doesn’t quite fit, it’s impossible not to get lost in “Pedro Páramo.” Fortunately, its surreal appeal, underpinned by a sense of tragic longing, is strong enough to resonate throughout its runtime.

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