The Curse of La Llorona Review

R: Violence and terror

Warner Bros Pictures, New Line Cinema, Atomic Monster

1 Hr and 34 Minutes

Director: Michael Chaves | Screenwriters: Mikki Daughtry, Tobias Iaconis

Cast: Linda Cardellini, Raymond Cruz, Patricia Velasquez, Marisol Ramirez, Sean Patrick Thomas, Jaynee-Lynne Kinchen, Roman Christou

Release Date: April 19th 2019

When Anna Garcia (Linda Cardellini), a social worker and widow raising her two children in 1970s Los Angeles, is called to check in on one of her cases, she finds signs of foul play. As she digs deeper, she finds striking similarities between the case and the terrifying supernatural occurrences haunting her family. Enlisting the help of a local faith healer, she discovers that La Llorona has latched herself onto Anna and will stop at nothing to take her children. La Llorona, also known as the Weeping Woman, is a female ghost in Latin American folklore who lost her children and causes misfortune to those nearby. As she searches for them, she takes other lost children, making them her own. Anna turns to mysticism with the help of a disillusioned priest to fight the evil entity.

At least I got two great laughs. Raymond Cruz comes in as a priest who helps Anna Garcia’s family and he adds a bit of humor to several scenes. Believe it or not, they’re actually funny.

Holy crap these Conjuring movies are getting worse. I still defend The Nun because it at least provided a chilling atmosphere and took advantage of its sequences by adding some fun imagery, but The Curse of La Llorona has to be the most banal studio horror film I’ve seen all year. It is repetitious, unscary and, most of all, stupid.

Around 20 minutes into the movie you figure out what the Curse of La Llorona is and what she does. It’s not that scary. The film is about a recently widowed Child Protective Services agent who unleashes a curse during one of her cases that kills two children and eventually passes on to her family. Seems simple enough, right? Well, what makes The Curse of La Llorona excruciating is its script, for it’s so barebones as it sacrifices any form of logic for every single character so it can deliver a cheap jump scare that is never scary.

Try making a bingo card of every cliched horror trope you can think of, bring it with you to the theater and you’ll for sure be shouting “BINGO!” in less than 30 minutes. Every single trope of the type A horror narrative is nailed and never once comes across as scary, primarily because the horror figure isn’t scary herself. From both her appearance and kill tactic, La Llorona is a weak and pathetic entity. Her design is literally the exact same as The Nun’s but Mexican and in a wedding dress. The only significance of her curse is drowning people, specifically. She brands you and soon enough she lures you to drown you.

Once you learn that early on, all sense of tension is whittled away, for it’s utterly lame. As horror figures go, that’s very low tier, and if you are scared of that: congratulations. You’re a pansy.

Besides the figure being so unscary, what makes you feel absolutely nothing for this film overall are the characters because they’re all fucking idiots.

I love it when screenwriters are unable to write kids and just make them flat out stupid as they fail to resemble any characteristics of actual kids. Anna has two kids with no personalities outside of tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum and might be the most poorly-written characters I’ve ever witnessed in a horror movie.

Very early on in the movie, Anna is called when her client’s kids are murdered and she goes to the scene of the crime as she leaves her kids in the back seat of the car. For some reason, out of some sort of curiosity and little common sense, her son gets out of the car and watches the crime scene from a higher view. He immediately hears the weeping woman eerily crying behind a gated area. Mind you, this is very late at night, the time kids’ vulnerabilities are heightened because kids are relatively scared of the dark. He sees her white dress and silhouetted face. In reality, that kid would’ve ran back to the car because that’s scary. Instead, he approaches the gate to get a closer look and then gets branded. Immediately,he runs to the car and has a traumatic experience as La Llorona attempts to open the car and he’s panicking. Once the mom returns, she asks, “What happened?” and he’s like, “I don’t know.”

KIDS WOULD NEVER NOT ADDRESS WHAT JUST HAPPENED TO THEM WHEN THEY’RE PANICKING!

Later on in the movie, the daughter encounters La Llorona as well and gets the same type of branding as her brother. When Anna returns and asks her what happened, her response is, “I fell.” Both of them have traumatic encounters with this spiritual figure and never address it and you’re just there in your seat going:

Every single repetitious horror sequence ends with an underwhelming response from the characters and they never further the plot. If I had a nickel for every time a kid screamed during a cheap jump scare, I would be several cents richer, but it’s an ample amount.

Then, Anna encounters La Llorona herself and once her kids ask her, “What’s going on?” she responds with, “Oh, it's nothing.”

I doubt this story would be resolved if all the characters would talk to each other about what they've seen seen, but if they did, we would've had a more interesting narrative instead of blatant opportunities to deliver a cheap jump scare sequence. For God’s sake, towards the climax, the daughter who’s had a total of three encounters with La Llorona makes the dumbest decision I’ve ever seen in a horror movie and it makes absolutely no sense in context with what’s going on in the story. What she does crosses out all facts of logic to the story and by that point you would feel nothing if she died. Nearly every single character is written so thinly, lacking in both personality and brains, that you feel nothing towards them. Whether they live or die, you don’t care. At the end, you’re going to end up saying,

With this being director Michael Chaves’ debut, the film suffers from so many inconsistencies in its script and trying to connect to an existing franchise that there’s never a chance for him to express his own voice as a filmmaker. As far as I’m concerned, it feels like an effort from a latchkey of James Wan since he produced this and this is his universe. We've seen this movie way too many times and the many opportunities it had to take an interesting path, it decides to take the most generic route for a horror movie.

I’m glad I didn’t see this at SXSW ‘cause my dumbass would have fallen in line with the festival hype and given it a good rating like I accidentally did with another horror movie.

This is just fucking banal with every stretch of the word that I’m just tired of New Line distributing and making Conjuring-related horror movies. Do something new because I don’t care anymore. Unless Conjuring 3 is a team-up of all their horror figures going against the Warrens, Monsters Unleashed-styled, then I don’t care. This just left a sour taste in my mouth, man.

The Curse La Llorona is so bland, hollow and unscary that, not only is it the worst Conjuring movie to date but, it makes you want to say:

Rating: 1/5 | 23%