It’s fortunate, then, that The Curse Of La Llorona’s final act lifts a mediocre horror into something rather thrilling.
THE CURSE OF LA LLORONA RATING MOVIE
It’s a solid basis for a horror movie – after all, some of the best horror uses motherhood as a starting point – but The Curse Of La Llorona never capitalises on Anna and Patricia’s parallel paths, and thematically it doesn’t go anywhere. Her path soon crosses with that of Patricia Alvarez, a fellow single mother of two who knows La Llorona’s wrath all too well and warns Anna that La Llorona will soon have her gimlet eyes set on her kids.
THE CURSE OF LA LLORONA RATING PROFESSIONAL
With her job centring around helping displaced children, it’s quickly apparent where La Llorona appears in the Venn diagram of Anna’s professional and personal lives. La Llorona is not an insignificant legend and despite placing its lead character adjacent to Latinx culture Anna always feels like a trespasser in someone else’s story. While Cardellini nails the few moments Anna is allowed to grieve, it’s hard to feel like this is her story. Linda Cardellini, a terrific actress who has played second fiddle to a slew of Hollywood men for the last five years, finally gets a lead part as Anna Tate-Garcia, a widowed social worker in the 70s trying in vain to juggle her work and her two children. Where The Curse Of La Llorona really struggles is in both retaining the Latin American roots and connecting it the present day. It’s a fascinating enough old wives’ story, about a woman who drowned her children in a fit of rage and now roams for eternity spitefully targeting other people’s offspring. Using the Mexican folk tale of La Llorona as the basis for a mainstream American horror was never an inherently bad idea. Fortunately, The Nun and The Curse Of La Llorona are unique enough in spirit (though, um, not unique in their identical looking spirits) to never feel like carbon copies of each but that doesn’t stop The Curse Of La Llorona from feeling more than a little bedevilled. His ever-expanding world, kick-started by The Conjuring back in 2013, is adding more and more ghouls to its Avengers-style roster and it was only time before there were similarities. It was a risky move by James Wan to release two horror films set in the same universe about two pale-faced bogeywomen mere months apart.