One set piece inside a parked car, whose windows keep rolling down and whose doors refuse to close properly, is enough to make you grab your armrest so hard you might never want to let it go. Not unlike the original Conjuring, it takes old-fashioned ghost-story and haunted-house devices - creaking doors and sleepwalking kids and conveniently timed blackouts - and revitalizes them. Part of the measure of any traditional horror film has to be the clever new visual reflections and misdirections it introduces, and La Llorona is filled with nifty scares, as the ghost is seen in darkened car windows and transparent umbrellas and convex security mirrors.
But soon enough, Anna’s own kids are being terrorized by La Llorona, and our heroine’s colleagues are investigating her for child endangerment, in the kind of reversal that has become de rigueur for disbelieving genre protagonists. Anna is convinced that the burn marks on the woman’s children and the traumatized looks on their faces come from a far more mundane but real monster: an abusive parent. Our heroine, recently widowed social worker and single mom Anna Tate-Garcia (Linda Cardellini), doesn’t take the myth seriously when one of her beleaguered cases tells her about it. Weeping over her kids, she now returns as a terrifying, white-veiled apparition and tries to take other people’s children. La Llorona, or “the crying woman,” is the name given to the ghost of a mother who, in 1673, drowned her sons as a way of getting back at her philandering husband.
Or to put it another way: Hooray, it’s scary! Seen in that light, The Curse of La Llorona, which expands this so-called cinematic universe with the introduction of a ghost from Mexican folklore, is a welcome new development. The Conjuring may have been a masterpiece of modern horror in 2013, but the titles that have followed - the lucrative sequels, spinoffs, and sequels to spinoffs - have offered diminishing artistic returns with bland stories and cheaper frights.
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