La Llorona is one of the most well-known, if not the most known tale in Latin American folklore. Generations have heard the harrowing story of the woman who, after her husband left, drowned her kids in a fit of rage, realized what she had done when she came to, and took her own life. Legend states that she kidnaps children and drowns them in the middle of the night, mistaking them for her own. This popular urban legend is ripe for a harrowing ghost story, but “The Curse of La Llorona“ — the latest entry in the ever-expanding “Conjuring” Universe — is more like a well-produced haunted corn maze at a backwoods farm in your hometown. It’s technically impressive and faulty in equal measure, expunging most of the substance in favor of occasionally effective, but mostly cheap, scares.
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The prologue starts in the 1600s with Maria (Marisol Ramirez), aka La Llorona, taking her children to the lake. Cut to 1973, where Anna (Linda Cardellini) — a recently-widowed social worker providing for her two children (Roman Christou and Jaynee-Lynne Kinchen)— discovers that one of her clients, Patricia (Patricia Valasquez), has been keeping her two boys trapped in a closet. The boys are taken out of her custody and tragedy strikes them at the hands of La Llorona, and the curse is passed onto Anna’s children. Desperate for a solution, she turns to an eccentric priest Rafael (Raymond Cruz) with unorthodox methods to rid their house of La Llorona’s curse.
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‘La Llorona’ introduces various textures to its very slight narrative (most of the film takes place inside their house) that are poignant, such as balancing personal grief with the burden of your children’s pain, working single mother stigma, a dead Hispanic husband, mixed-race kids, and why this singularly Latin American curse targets them. But without substantial connective tissue, these concepts are more of a footnote than a thesis. The closest thing to a connector is Cardellini, whose talents have been sadly underutilized in film as of late in small, stay-at-home wife roles (we’re looking at you, “Green Book”). Here she gets to show a side of her abilities that she’s never gotten to do before, and sells the rote haunted material with genuine fear and a well-established take-charge demeanor. As far as the rest of the cast, something feels off, and it’s difficult to decipher whether it is the ancillary performances themselves, or if it’s the paint-by-numbers screenplay by Mikki Daughtry and Tobias Iaconis (“Five Feet Apart”). Cruz’s priest character is potentially fascinating and has these rugged, deadpan line deliveries, but feel ill-placed even as levity in this story that is relentlessly somber. Same for the children Jaynee-Lynne Kinchen and Roman Christou, who also aren’t given much except to scream and be tossed around like rag dolls by La Llorona, including the scene that’s a staple of all dysfunctional horror films, where the character is told not to do something, and then they immediately turn around and do it.
Directed by newcomer Michael Chaves, it’s very clear early on in the film’s style— still tracking shots, crane shots that start at a dutch angle and slowly spin straight, etc., etc.— that “La Llorona” producer and “Conjuring” Universe spearhead James Wan had heavy input on the look and feel of the film. Wan’s aesthetic has always been a combination of subtle stillness and bombast and that’s carried through here. Wan’s best films build spectacularly to the latter, but “La Llorona” feels more like a queasy roller coaster, that leaves you with whiplash by the end. Some spotty editing choices don’t help either, nor does a hyper-contemporary use of Red cameras that eradicates any verisimilitude of this thing taking place in 1973. The only indicators of the year is some of the production design, and the inclusion of Tony Amendola reprising his role from “Annabelle” as Father Perez, who tells Anna that he first witnessed this evil in “a doll,” cutting to a shoehorned flashback of the titular doll. It’s clear that the initial draft of this script had nothing to do with “The Conjuring,” but in a “Cloverfield”-style manner, Wan and his team found a way to tie this project into the greater universe. While laughably throwaway, to the film’s credit, it is not bogged-down or defined by its connection to the greater universe, and is the first one of these spin-offs since “Annabelle: Creation” to feel like its own contained story.
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Despite noble efforts to replicate a brand and tell a melancholic ghost story about the transferring of grief, “The Curse of La Llorona” plays out like a “Creepshow” short stretched to feature-length; there are some good aspects (Cardellini and some occasionally solid imagery, specifically one where someone dives into a pool and the scene is illuminated solely by a flashlight), but not enough to warrant even the scant 93-minute running time. Chaves is taking over for the more-insanely-busy-than-ever Wan on “The Conjuring 3,” to which “La Llorona” often feels like a training ground for, knowing that if Wan’s influence as producer and his flesh-and-blood passion in the film’s screenplay are there, the mimicry of his style can fill the void left. But if he hopes to create something special, distinct and unique in this universe, he might want to think about trying to bring his own voice to the spooky proceedings. [C]