The Horror Show
The Curse of La Llorona
Michael Chaves
Ghost stories, tormented souls, and the malicious spirit of ‘The Weeping Woman’ are the raw ingredients that could have made The Curse of La Llorona extremely powerful, especially in cases where James Wan’s name is somehow involved, our expectations are really high. He truly knows how to season traditional scares with a bit of personality and that’s why his gift as a filmmaker is striking. In The Curse of La Llorona, the director’s chair belongs to Michael Chaves, whereas Wan serves only as a producer.
While it isn’t a part of the chilling Conjuring franchise, The Curse of La Llorona is oddly linked with Annabelle, the memorable evil doll. But first things first: the story. Chaves’s narrative takes us back 300 years ago; a time when La Llorona was a mother who drowned her two children after discovering her husband had an affair with another woman. This tragic macabre incident turned into an urban legend for future generations, and as the story moves forward to the 70s, we are introduced to struggling widow Anna (Linda Cardellini). Anna soon finds out that La Llorona is more than just an urban legend and that the child-killing spirit has set her eyes on Anna’s family.
Personally, I feel this is a flick created to speak to the hearts of audiences looking for quick scares rather than causing deep thought-through horror. Michael Chaves tried hard to put all the pieces together in order to deliver a creepy atmosphere and he did an alright job.
Cardellini gets enough meat from Mikki Daughtry and Tobias Iaconis's script, but ultimately she cannot pick herself up from the stereotypical mother-in-distress role. Chaves, on the other hand, in an effort to make us viewers feel a bit uneasy, chooses to utilize a tactic that is not often preferred by filmmakers: violence towards children. While being quite generous with showing graphic scenes of violence, the unsuccessful use of jump scares that reek of clichéd horror is doing more damage than good.
Maria Kriva, HMS
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