There were enough red flags going into The Curse of La Llorona to make me worry. Setting a story that relies so heavily on a latino folklore in 1970s Los Angeles was one thing, and having a Caucasian protagonist was even worse. But this movie`s most serious flaw is that it simply feels lazy. There are enough good intentions to make you appreciate the effort, but every choice made feels like they wanted it to be done as quickly as possible with no regard for the original folktale or the people who care about it. Add a shoehorned-in last-minute Conjuring connection and you get this horror franchise´s version of The Cloverfield Paradox.The legend of La Llorona, or The Weeping Woman, is arguably the most famous horror folktale in Latin America. Every country has their own version, but they mostly agree that La Llorona is the ghost of a woman whose children drowned (either by her hand, or someone else´s) and in her grief, she killed herself. She now spends her afterlife stuck in purgatory, weeping for her lost children and looking for new children to make her own. It´s a simple story, but there is no denying the huge impact it´s had on Latin American culture for generations, so it´s refreshing and exciting for La Llorona to finally make her debut in an American studio film. But this was the wrong film to do it.We start with a prologue set in 1673 Mexico that shows the film´s version of the folktale, where our titular villainess murders her children, before jumping forward in time to Los Angeles. Here we meet social worker Anna (Linda Cardellini), a widower to a latino police officer who is called to the home of Patricia Alvarez (Patricia Velásquez). What appears to be a normal case of terrible parenting actually has something even more sinister behind it, and before long, two kids are dead, and the evil spirit has set her sights on Anna´s children.Director Michael Chaves makes an impressive directorial debut with The Curse of La Llorona, and within a few minutes you ...
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