The Real ‘Curse of La Llorona’ Was Having to Watch It

The cacophony of unnecessary squelching and the ungodly banging of doors and drawers in “The Curse of La Llorona” are enough to give anyone a migraine. As the new director taking charge of “The Conjuring” series, director Michael Chaves fails to bring audiences the same thrilling experience that fans of the first and second “Conjuring” films are accustomed to from James Wan, the series’ former director. The sixth installment in the Conjuring Universe, “The Curse of La Llorona” is a disappointment. In the past, Wan crafted haunted atmospheres that paralyzed viewers as they were immersed in the spiritual journey of characters. “The Curse of La Llorona,” however, is plagued by dull storytelling, and Chaves does not nearly match the caliber of Wan’s past work.

The film hinges on an old and fascinating piece of Mexican folklore. “La Llorona,” or “The Weeping Woman,” is a Mexican folklore tale used to scare children into obeying their parents. Legend has it that La Llorona was originally a young woman named Maria who married a wealthy nobleman and gave birth to two boys. When Maria found her husband with a younger woman, she exacted revenge on him by drowning their sons because they were what her husband cared about the most. After realizing what she had done, she killed herself in despair. She remains on the cusp of the living and the afterlife, attempting to drown other children in order to get hers back. While this sounds like a reasonable backstory to motivate any distraught ghost in a horror movie and is a fascinating and chilling tale on its own, the bland execution of this film is the real curse, and an injustice to the actual myth of La Llorona.

The film centers around Los Angeles in the ’70s. A recently-widowed mother named Anna (Linda Cardellini) works as a social worker for Child Protective Services as she struggles to adapt to the single-mother lifestyle and raise her children Chris (Roman Christou) and Samantha (Jaynee-Lynne Kinchen). Anna’s involvement with La Llorona begins with one of Anna’s cases: Patricia Alvarez (Patricia Velasquez), a mother whose sons haven’t been to school for a few days. When Anna checks on the family, the boys are nowhere to be seen. She realizes that Patricia has her sons locked inside of a closet, so she arrests Patricia and sends her sons to foster care. Patricia maintains that she was just protecting her sons, and it’s very clear that all three of them are scared of an outside agent and not each other — something that a more nuanced social worker would be able to sense. The film picks up pace when, after Patricia and her children are separated, her boys are found dead. As Anna rushes to the crime scene, she brings her children with her (her first mistake — what mother brings her children with her to the scene of a potential murder?). At the crime scene, Chris comes into contact with the culprit, La Llorona — a sobbing woman in a dirty wedding gown damp with muddy water — as she chooses him as her next victim.

La Llorona's appearances in the film become tiresome and predictable, as viewers begin to associate the strong gusts of wind with her arrival. The lack of variation in jump scares and tension-building sequences also detract from the film, which would have been a more thrilling sensory experience if Chaves had enhanced La Llorona’s powers instead of only focusing on her robotic impulse to kill the children by drowning them. Throughout the film, La Llorona has the power to telekinetically move things, control people’s actions, control the tenacity of the wind, and inflict harm burning her victims with her touch, but Chaves never develops these terrifying capacities further. While Chaves remains loyal to the legend of La Llorona, the audience knows that nothing truly bad will happen unless the characters are near a body of water. This limitation makes the children’s harrowing encounters with La Llorona on dry land anticlimactic and much less suspenseful than they could have been.

However, this film did have a few redeeming qualities. It’s one of the few popular films to center on an aspect of Latin American culture, which is otherwise sorely underrepresented in Hollywood. Chaves also manages to get a few spectacular scenes in the film. In one moment, the camera’s movements match the gust of wind blowing at the door upon La Llorona’s arrival, giving the scene a voyeuristic perspective as the audience moves with the wind. The fact that La Llorona freely follows the family around wherever they go heightens the uncertainty that the characters and audience feel.

“La Llorona” is ultimately an average horror film at best. It’s a relatively good match for those seeking the adrenaline rush of jump scares — of which this film has no shortage — but are too squeamish to expect convoluted, truly terrifying plot twists. Ultimately, the film lacks a substantive plot, and barely matches a viewer’s lowest expectations.