One scene is so egregious in that regard, it's becomes hard to care about that character again. The themes of child abuse - a particularly relevant subplot in a film about La Llorona - are all but ignored, and the characters are often written dumb as posts in order to facilitate the next scare. That's the basic set up and, it's a good one! Unfortunately, the film is hamstrung by a script from Mikki Daughtry and Tobias Iaconis (who's only other feature credit, the YA drama Five Feat Apart, just hit theaters) that does absolutely nothing with all its potential. And just like that, Anna and her family are caught in La Llorona's weeping nightmare, and suddenly she's the one getting strange looks from her CPS co-workers.
As soon as Anna takes them away, the weeping ghoul comes calling, drowning both boys before a new day breaks.
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Of course, Anna thinks it's her job to rescue them from an abusive situation, but we know full well that Patricia was trying to protect them from La Llorona. Anna receives a call and journeys to Patricia's home, where she finds the mother frazzled and frantic - terrified - with her equally frightened two sons locked in a closet. Running parallel to her story is that of Patricia Alvarez ( Patricia Valasquez).
Jump forwards to 1970s Los Angeles, where the film picks up with Linda Cardellini's Anna Tate-Garcia, a Child Protective Services social worker raising two sons on her own after the death of her husband.
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That makes for a film that's never quite as scary as the nightmares I grew up having of La Llorona, but one that will provide audiences with plenty of easy, breezy thrills and a movie that practically invites you to scream and groan in unison with its familiar set-ups and scares. This is a studio horror, a popcorn fright fest that's right at home in the Conjuring-verse, and drowning children is dark stuff, naturally, they're going to play it for thrills over ponderous existential horrors. It's a brief but effective sequence that sets the tone of the film well. The film begins with a brief establishing sequence set in 1673 Mexico, introducing audiences to La Llorona in the heat of her infanticidal rage - dressed head to toe in her veiled gown, she struggles to hold her son's head underwater as her other child looks on in terror. Naturally, it was only a matter of time before La Llorona's spooky tale got the Hollywood treatment (frankly, I'm shocked it took this long), and she's shacking up with her fellow ghouls in New Line and James Wan's ever-growing Conjuring universe in The Curse of La Llorona. Now doesn't that just give you a case of the shivers? Hide your kids, hide your wife, La Llorona's drowning everybody out here.
The horrors of her grief are such that, even the sound of her cires are said to bring death and misfortune to those who hear her. Now, caught between the world of the living and the dead, she eternally searches for her children, kidnapping any wandering child she finds and drowning them. Realizing what she's done, she prowled the riverbank for days after, looking for her sons, only to be found dead on the banks days later. The story goes that La Llorona, a woman of renown beauty, learned of her husband's infidelity and in a fit of grief and rage took from him the thing he loves most - his children - drowning them in the river. A ghoulish, cautionary tale whispered into children's ears to keep them from straying at night or playing in dangerous waters, La Llorona has haunted kids' nightmares for generations. La Llorona, aka the Wailing Woman, is one of the most popular folklore figures of all time.