Rosario Confronts the Horror in Family Sacrifice

It’s a familiar pressure: the children of immigrants often struggle to live up to the sacrifices their parents and grandparents made for them. That dynamic is at the heart of Rosario, a new horror film starring Emeraude Toubia.

It’s a pattern first-time film director Felipe Vargas knows well. Born in Colombia and raised in South Florida, he told Refinery29 Somos that his family “left their family, their career, their home, to pursue a better, a safer life here in the U.S.” For him, “that was a big burden on my shoulders, because I was so appreciative, but it also meant I have to do something with that, and I have to honor that, and make sure that I take advantage of these opportunities that I have. So to me, there's a horror in that. There's a beauty in it, too, but there's a real pressure and terror that I think this film captured.”

When Rosario starts, the titular character is a successful stockbroker living alone in New York. After learning that her undocumented abuela has died, she chooses to cross town, despite the major storm sweeping in, to wait with the body so it doesn’t get lost in the system. Once there, some truly frightening things start to go down as Rosario encounters her family’s past, her grandmother’s practice of Palo (a religious tradition with African and Catholic roots that originated in Cuba and became popular in Mexico), and many other long-buried family secrets. As Toubia told Somos, “She's not only dealing with her inner demons, but she's also dealing with demons.”

Rosario is initially so disconnected from her roots that she assumes her grandmother cursed the body out of jealousy of her granddaughter’s many successes. It’s a telling misread of the situation and what’s about to befall the heroine. The trope of the cruel Latina matriarch may be common in media (think “Real Women Have Curves” or “Like Water for Chocolate”), but in real life, it’s far more complex. Rosario delves into that complexity, revealing the intergenerational trauma that has shaped its lead character.

The truth is that Rosario only believes her grandmother is capable of such evil because she’s ashamed — of her background and of the women who sacrificed for her. That shame warps her perception of her family, whose motivations are rooted in love, not resentment. Toubia sees that pattern too often: “Sometimes we try to show something we're not to be accepted … to fit in. And we forget about where we come from and who we are, and the sacrifices our family has made,” she said. “The moment we start feeling proud of all those things is the moment we really get to shine and to become our best full selves.”

Without giving too much away, Rosario ultimately embarks on a journey of reconnection. She learns to respect and embrace Palo as the embodiment of her culture, even as the film plays up the darker side of the religion for frights. “When it came to Palo, we chose that religion because it's a religion based on sacrifice. You give something to get something. Everything has a cost,” Vargas said. Thematically, that makes sense, but it’s frustrating to see Rosario read a definition of Palo that highlights its African roots when we don’t see any African or Afro-Latine characters on screen. It’s almost like the film is subtly equating the occult and all the horror Rosario goes through with Blackness — even if that’s not their intention. It’s hard to ignore that the horrors she confronts are rooted in an African tradition that she, and surely many other Latines, will see as foreign to themselves, rightly or not.

Vargas, for his part, says he wants to normalize Palo and other Latin American and Caribbean religions, calling the violent combination of African and Indigenous traditions with European displacement “the history of America.”

“A great Catholic horror film or Christian horror film creates these tropes and visual languages. I would love to do the same with Palo and eventually with so many other Latin myths, cultures, and folk tales,” he said. “This is our spirituality. This is our connection to our ancestors, to our roots, to our world, to the people and the community around us. This is real, and it's powerful.”

That burden — of representing first-gen identity — is something Rosario carries. If there were many depictions of Palo and other African or Indigenous religions, its use here might feel less fraught. But there aren’t. If viewers have never heard of Palo, they may walk away believing it’s just about making deals with dark forces. Just as Hollywood has done with Vodou, horror films risk flattening complex African spiritual systems into symbols of evil and “uncivilized” mysticism. Rosario tiptoes toward that trap, even as it tries to honor its subject.

But Vargas did make efforts to tell a nuanced and accurate story about Palo. The “all Latino crew … consulted with real paleros,” he said. “We went to botánicas and got real items, and they really helped shape this film so that it felt authentic.” He sees the character’s journey — from not even knowing what Palo is to saying a Palo prayer and honoring its practices — as “embracing that sort of ancestry and that sacrifice.” This makes it seem like the film ends triumphantly, but there’s a troubling final shot that implies Rosario may still be haunted by Palo’s supernatural forces — not nurtured by them.

Still, there is a wholesome message at the heart of this film: call your elders more often. A stronger relationship with her abuela would have saved Rosario a lot of time and pain. But more than that, our parents and grandparents carry so much knowledge about a past that shaped us. It behooves all of us to listen more and ask questions while we still can.

Rosario gets a supernatural intervention that takes her through her family history so she can become a better version of herself. As for the rest of us, let’s just use the phone. I know I’ve got at least one tía to check in on.