The Book of Stone (1969), Mexican filmmaker Carlos Enrique Taboada’s fourth directing effort, continues in the mode of his previous movie, Even the Wind is Afraid (1968): It’s another Gothic chiller whose slow-burning narrative is laid out masterfully, withholding answers in a way that keeps you on edge without testing your patience. It wouldn’t be as effective if it were to reveal too much too soon — an instinct that pervades a genre reliably overeager to shock — because this is a movie that ponders how long it might take before a household can no longer pretend like its dysfunctions weren’t as much of a problem as everybody would like to think.

The Book of Stone opens with the arrival of Julia (Marga López), a smartly dressed governess hired to look after and privately tutor Silvia (Lucy Buj), the young daughter of a wealthy businessman named Eugenio (Joaquín Cordero). Silvia hasn’t gone back to school after a nearly fatal bout of meningitis a couple of years ago; her isolation has morphed into what Eugenio flatly describes as “strange behavior,” which can manifest into what appears to be a kind of mental illness for which he hasn’t bothered taking her to the doctor to get treatment. 

Silvia, Eugenio, and Eugenio’s second wife, Mariana (Norma Lazareno), recently moved into the tucked-away countryside home where The Book of Stone is largely set. Since arriving, Silvia has come to see the unsettling statue that sits in the backyard — it’s of a little boy named Hugo reading a book — as something of an imaginary friend. Eugenio and Mariana are worried, though, because whereas most children can play with, say, a doll and recognize that whatever stories they make up are just stories, a prettily dressed inanimate object their main character, Silvia talks of Hugo as if he were real.

Marga López in The Book of Stone.

Julia initially gives Silvia the benefit of the doubt. She’s understandably quick to assume that her newest pupil is simply lonely, misunderstood by the only people she ever sees. But steadily trickling-in discoveries about Hugo start to make his apparent hold over her concerning. (A key one: that Hugo is supposedly the son of a 700-year-old sorcerer, frozen in stone for centuries to ensure he can protect the black-magic-full book he holds in case his father comes back from the dead.) Could there be any other reason why Silvia can only grin when a family friend’s dog is discovered dead under unclear circumstances?

The Book of Stone reveals discoveries like that one with methodical slowness, confirming that something is terribly wrong with subtle signs rather than clobbering devices like jump scares. There might be a disembodied shadow standing on a roof; an unwelcome face in a mirror; a sudden jolt of unbearable pain while driving; a thought-lost broach suddenly returned in the middle of the night without an explanation. (It isn’t until nearly an hour and 15 minutes into the movie that a scholar who specializes in the supernatural is enlisted for advice.) Taboada’s use of the countryside setting is hair-raisingly effective, too. The unending rustling of trees and tall grasses, and the way shadow overwhelms everything by night, makes you think the worst of sounds and mysterious shapes that will turn out to be harmless. (The last governess, it’s revealed late in the movie, left because she could no longer bear spending evening after evening certain something sinister was skulking around in the garden outside her room.) 

The Book of Stone’s creeping pace and pointed underplaying of warning signs eerily evoke parental denial of problems festering inside a home until their destructiveness has reached a breaking point. The astonishingly bleak ending is a testament to just how harmful parental passivity — and the willful, misguided maintenance of a veneer of normalcy — can be.