The curse of la Llorona - a review

A child protection worker finds herself confronted with the reality of the legend of la Llorono. Together with a former priest she has to battle the 'woman in white' to save her family.

The curse of la Llorona is your typical run of the mill haunted family story. And truth be told there isn't much this movie adds to the genre instead of entering a solid new entry in the annals.

I enjoyed the fact that this movie is linked to the Conjuring/Annabel franchise. In a world in which every movie has to be part of some sort of franchise (why not Hereditary as I said before ) why not go 'old school' and start a new horror franchise of the likes of the Universal monsters of the '50s, the Hammer vampires of the '60 and the various slasher-nemesis centred pieces of the '80s.

Now it seems clear to me that the Conjuring-franchise has set itself on a path to make a scary tale of every supernatural story from around the world.

And, as my next article will tell: there are a lot of them to choose from.

This review, therefore, serves a bit as an introduction.

First we had eastern Europe in The Nun. Now we have Latino/Mexican culture with la Llorono (With Pixar's Coco it might have been a coincidence in timing. But, now with Trump reigning for over three years I doubt there is any coincidence for choosing this story. I think The curse of la Llorona is just a small stab at the current American president by showing that not all Mexican-Americans are as vile as he wants to believe).

The curse of la Llorona ties itself neatly to the Conjuring-franchise by reusing some of the shots and the spooks and scares of the franchise-entries previous.

There is a nice long-take shot at the beginning of this movie that established both the layout of the house as the family dynamic. Then there are the spooks and scares that utilizes the classic blueprint of foreshadowing and payoff.

The curse of la Llorona uses all (and I mean ALL) the tropes of recent horror-films. The girl in the bathtub from Are you afraid of the dark, The attic of Sinister, the basement of the Conjuring, the (inverted) long gown of The woman in black, the scorned mother of Mother and so on, and so on.

And that's even without naming the obvious ones of: moving furniture, dragged around the room characters, slamming doors, ex-priests, screaming mothers, handy shadows, slow moving characters, lightning storms and the 'silence before the storm' moment. Those tropes, I would say, are -almost- as old as terror-cinema itself.

Does this make The Curse of la Llorona a bad movie? No of course not. The movie is lovingly acted and has a pretty solid script to boot.

As is common with the Conjuring-franchise the story is set in a time before mobile phones were commonplace.

1973, this time 'round. I will always consider this a smart move.

I would argue that any teenager sleepover party will love this movie to bits simply because they haven't seen many other movies. For the horror-fans like me, however, the movie is a bit of a rerun of fan-favourites. A fun movie for a night in, as it were.

The curse of la Llorona is therefore a solid entry in the ever-growing anthology of the Conjuring-franchise and a testament of, what I consider, a smart move by the studio. By making the scary stories these movies tell international and intercultural there is enough diversity to pick from. From this the franchise one could create an massive multi-colour canvas of scary stories.

Also these movies are fairly cheap to make so for any production-studio that's a big plus.

But; if every picture on this metaphorical 'canvas' looks similar you will get a rather boring whole. So, here's me, hoping that the next entry in this franchise will shake things up a bit.

Who knows; what's wrong with a haunting at a retirement home? Why not give the 'kids and single-mother'-trope a break for a while and have a ghost wreak havoc at a prison? the possibilities are endless.
And, as I will state in my next article, there are quite a few ghouls and ghosts to pick from that haven't had their 'silver screen' debut yet.