The Curse of La Llorona #FilmReview

Ignoring the eerie warning of a troubled mother suspected of child endangerment, a social worker and her own small kids are soon drawn into a frightening supernatural realm.

Tagline: She Wants Your Children:
Starring:  Linda Cardellini, Raymond Cruz, Patricia Velasquez
Language: English | Triggers: Child Death | Rating: 2 out of 5
Source: Watched at movie theatre

The Curse of La LLorona Review

V’s Thoughts

Before I watched the film, I had a bias against it because they chose to not have a Latinx lead. The explanation given was that the writers wanted an “outsider” to experience the tale from an unknown place. Neither writer was Latinx. Lemme hold my nose cuz I just stepped in a pile of bullshit.

Anna Tate-Garcia (we aren’t stupid so don’t try to trick us- she not Latina) is a widowed social worker with two children. When one of her clients has kept her children home from school, Anna goes to the house to check on the family. The mother is bat shit crazy and the children locked in the closet for protection. This leads to fatal consequences. La Llorona is unleashed and Anna has to fight to protect her own family from this threat.

I’m an optimist so I will start with the positives. The acting was good. But this is cultural appropriation at its worst. This takes a Latinx tale and only gives Latinx folks a taste, just enough to look like they are trying. This didn’t deliver on ANY scares.

Marisol Ramirez did an excellent job as La Llorona and looked scary, however, the story itself was not even Old El Paso jalapeno hot. I needed fresh, picked from the bush, habanero scary heat that my abuela had in her garden. I need the fear my family put into ME when I was a kid. I still remember how I felt after hearing those stories. That fear is imprinted so deep in my psyche. Which leads me to my next point.

What would have Latinx writers done differently? How would it have played out with an all Latinx cast? I think it would have been MORE frightening through the lens of people that already hold that fear. Are nightmares come true not terrifying? No shade to the actors involved, but shame on the people that put it together. In the film they do try to tie it back into the Annabelle universe, however, I assume they did this just to pull in customers as opposed to making the best story possible. This film is a 2 at best. I really don’t want to watch a film where the white woman is trying to save children being drowned by Latinas. Call me crazy or angry. I’m ok with both.

Lilyn’s Thoughts
V’s points are so much more cogent than mine ,but this white girl said she’d put in her own two cents, and here they are: I was similarly troubled by the fact that the main lead with not Latinx. However most of my ire in the movie was focused on the fact that that it could have been so much better than it was. There was a story there, waiting to be told, and it could have been good. Instead it would seem that “From the producers of the Conjuring” meant that it had to be a third-rate jump-scare Wan ass-kisser that guaranteed it was neither going to live up to it’s potential nor was it going to please any audience that had a desire for an actual scary movie and not two-bit jumps scares that seem to be ruining perfectly good horror movies lately.

The beginning of The Curse of La Llorona had me on the edge of my seat. The end of the movie had me yawning and regretting wasting my money.I think had they had Latinx cast guiding them, this movie might have actually began to be scary. As it was, the good acting is the only thing that saved this movie from total direct-to-dvd boringness.