The Curse of La Llarona (2019)
Directed by Michael Chaves
Written by Mikki Daughtry, Tobias Iaconis
Starring Linda Cardellini, Raymond Cruz, Patricia Velasquez, Marisol Ramirez
Release Date April 19th, 2019
Published April 19th, 2019
The Curse of La Llorona is another movie under the banner of The Conjuring movie universe. The film was produced by James Wan but not directed by the man who has made this the most underestimated movie franchise going today. I may not be a fan of any of these movies, not even The Conjuring, but there is no denying that The Conjuring Movie Universe is a legit phenomenon. The Nun, The Annabelle movies and now The Curse of La Llorona, go to show the enduring power of ghost stories.
The Curse of La Llorona stars Linda Cardellini of Freaks & Geeks fame as Anna, a DCFS worker and recent widow, living in the early 1970’s Los Angeles with her two kids. Anna has been struggling at work and having cases taken from her but when a long term case comes back up for a review, she insists on being the investigator assigned. This will be a fateful decision as she will attempt to save two boys from a manic mother only to have tragedy prove to be unavoidable due to circumstances beyond her control.
The mother in question was attempting to save her two sons from the Curse of La Llorona, aka The Curse of the Weeping Woman. In a prologue set in 16th Century Mexico we see a woman in a wedding gown caring for her two sons until something mysterious and strange happens. Soon, one of the boys is alone and wanders until he finds his mother crying while murdering his brother by drowning him in a lake. How this curse lingers from Mexico in the 1600’s to 1970’s Los Angeles is not something the movie cares to explain.
After failing to save the two boys from the supposed curse, Anna finds her and her two kids, Chris (Roman Christou) and Samantha (Jaynee-Lynne Kinchen), the subject of the curse and in desperate need of help. In a cameo, Tony Amendolo portrays Father Perez who was first introduced in Annabelle. Father Perez is the first to step in and offer help but when church protocol slows things down, he offers up a former clergyman, Rafael Olvera (Raymond Cruz), a man who battles demons in a fashion that even the church finds extreme.
That’s the set up for the rest of the plot, such as that plot is. If you aren’t a fan of movies that are merely a series of loud noises leading to creepy people in makeup popping into frame at random moments, The Curse of La Llorona is not the movie for you. There is nothing more to The Curse of La Llorona than a series of jump scares. You could get the same thrills watching a cat run into a room and back out again without warning.
The Curse of La Llorona is yet another silly ghost movie where the ghost in question has unlimited powers and yet never bothers to actually complete its goal of killing the people it came to kill. Weirder still is how powerless anyone is to stop La Llorona and how ineffective she is. Her targets are children whom she is easily able to corner, one of them she even has twice, trapped under water, and she is still foiled. How is she foiled? Good question, I was watching the movie and I don’t have that answer.
La Llorona throws over chairs and slams doors and throws children into swimming pools and down flights of stairs and yet she never appears able to actually finish what she starts and we have no idea why. The makers of The Curse of La Llorona have so little respect for our wits as audience members that they don’t bother to create a rational set of rules for the character to follow. Sometimes she can be foiled by Anna yelling at her, other times she’s foiled by dirt from sacred ground or holy water. It’s whatever arbitrary device the movie needs to sustain more than 100 minutes of run time.
This lack of logic, this lack of care for character motivation sinks pretty much every movie in The Conjuring Movie Universe for me. Never once are we introduced to a demon or ghost character with any motivation for their malevolence. The ghost/demon is evil and that is all the motivation the filmmakers feel is necessary. But from a structural, plot standpoint that is simply wrong. It sets up a scenario where you know that the main characters A, B and C will be fine at least until the end because the runtime dictates it and the supposedly terrifying scenes of the first two acts of the movie are just creepy for the sake of creepy because the payoff can’t come until the end
I will never understand why so many people enjoy a jump scare machine movie like The Curse of La Llorona. It’s almost the same movie every time. The same jump scares, the same lingering camera on windblown curtains, the slamming doors and overturned chairs and the same creeptastic makeup design for the creatures who pop into frame to pop goes the weasel you into dumping your popcorn.
Why does this continue to be fun for you?
