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This limitation makes the children’s harrowing encounters with La Llorona on dry land anticlimactic and much less suspenseful than they could have been. While Chaves remains loyal to the legend of La Llorona, the audience knows that nothing truly bad will happen unless the characters are near a body of water. Throughout the film, La Llorona has the power to telekinetically move things, control people’s actions, control the tenacity of the wind, and inflict harm burning her victims with her touch, but Chaves never develops these terrifying capacities further.
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The lack of variation in jump scares and tension-building sequences also detract from the film, which would have been a more thrilling sensory experience if Chaves had enhanced La Llorona’s powers instead of only focusing on her robotic impulse to kill the children by drowning them. La Llorona's appearances in the film become tiresome and predictable, as viewers begin to associate the strong gusts of wind with her arrival. At the crime scene, Chris comes into contact with the culprit, La Llorona - a sobbing woman in a dirty wedding gown damp with muddy water - as she chooses him as her next victim. As Anna rushes to the crime scene, she brings her children with her (her first mistake - what mother brings her children with her to the scene of a potential murder?). The film picks up pace when, after Patricia and her children are separated, her boys are found dead. Patricia maintains that she was just protecting her sons, and it’s very clear that all three of them are scared of an outside agent and not each other - something that a more nuanced social worker would be able to sense. She realizes that Patricia has her sons locked inside of a closet, so she arrests Patricia and sends her sons to foster care. When Anna checks on the family, the boys are nowhere to be seen. Anna’s involvement with La Llorona begins with one of Anna’s cases: Patricia Alvarez (Patricia Velasquez), a mother whose sons haven’t been to school for a few days. A recently-widowed mother named Anna (Linda Cardellini) works as a social worker for Child Protective Services as she struggles to adapt to the single-mother lifestyle and raise her children Chris (Roman Christou) and Samantha (Jaynee-Lynne Kinchen). The film centers around Los Angeles in the ’70s.
#The curse of la llorona 2019 movie#
While this sounds like a reasonable backstory to motivate any distraught ghost in a horror movie and is a fascinating and chilling tale on its own, the bland execution of this film is the real curse, and an injustice to the actual myth of La Llorona. She remains on the cusp of the living and the afterlife, attempting to drown other children in order to get hers back. After realizing what she had done, she killed herself in despair. When Maria found her husband with a younger woman, she exacted revenge on him by drowning their sons because they were what her husband cared about the most. Legend has it that La Llorona was originally a young woman named Maria who married a wealthy nobleman and gave birth to two boys. “La Llorona,” or “The Weeping Woman,” is a Mexican folklore tale used to scare children into obeying their parents. The film hinges on an old and fascinating piece of Mexican folklore. “The Curse of La Llorona,” however, is plagued by dull storytelling, and Chaves does not nearly match the caliber of Wan’s past work.
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In the past, Wan crafted haunted atmospheres that paralyzed viewers as they were immersed in the spiritual journey of characters. The sixth installment in the Conjuring Universe, “The Curse of La Llorona” is a disappointment. As the new director taking charge of “The Conjuring” series, director Michael Chaves fails to bring audiences the same thrilling experience that fans of the first and second “Conjuring” films are accustomed to from James Wan, the series’ former director. The cacophony of unnecessary squelching and the ungodly banging of doors and drawers in “The Curse of La Llorona” are enough to give anyone a migraine.