The Curse Of La Llorona (2019)
The Curse Of La Llorona: [Speaking Spanish] | 2/5
Written by Noah Dietz: 4/19/2025
Welcome to the bonus Conjuring universe review! Well, mostly a bonus. Officially this isn’t connected to the mainline universe, though it is directed by Michael Chaves and produced by James Wan and a slew of other Conjuring-connected people. Oh, and Tony Amendola returns as Father Perez from Annabelle. But no, not part of the mainline continuity at all. Doesn’t matter that Annabelle is literally shown in this film, this is not part of the universe, nope.
After a brief glimpse into the past, we get to enjoy a pretty kinetic opening while Anna (Linda Cardellini) gets her kids Chris (Roman Christou) and Samantha (Jaynee-Lynne Kinchen) ready for school. This is followed by Anna at her day job, working in child services as a caseworker. The bright tone of moments before drops as she’s sent to visit Patricia (Patricia Velásquez), who has been keeping her kids home from school. Unfortunately, what originally seems to be a case of simple neglect is shown to be a haunting by the Mexican folklore monster, La Llorona (Marisol Ramirez). When Patricia’s kids are killed by the specter, it moves its attention to Anna’s family, causing her to reach out to any support she can find. Father Perez directs her to Rafael (Raymond Cruz), a former priest and current … shaman? … who deals in the type of protection she’s searching for.
I think there’s some honestly good work in here. It’s not some next-level, cutting-edge horror movie, but it’s also not as bad as some of the ones I’ve watched recently, or even just this month. I think, for example, this is slightly more compelling than Annabelle and far more compelling than The Nun. Exiting American and European stories and bringing in a Mexican folk story is a good move, in my books. It’s fresh, it has weight to it, and we’ve got some great performances from our leads helping flesh out the story. That’s not to say this is amazing; there’s a lot of floundering here that disappoints me. For about thirty minutes in the middle, instead of much compelling story development we mostly get screamed at by the ghost. That being said, the film generally follows the same sort of story and emotional arc that the average Conjuring spinoff does. Generally middling at best, but not horrible.
This isn’t necessarily a fault of the film directly, but nothing irks me like when something has multiple languages in it but when it’s not a moment of English it says “speaking foreign language” or, in this case, “speaking Spanish.” Frankly, I would have enjoyed more of this film being in Spanish, so minimizing it and obscuring what we have to the largely American audience that The Conjuring films are geared toward feels gross. Be brave: embrace the audience you’re taking a story from. We can be bigger than “there’s Latino people in Los Angeles.” We can embrace the entire continent of South America, or at the very least we can embrace the country of Mexico where the story originated.
All this having been said, this still feels more fun than some of the other franchise entries. It’s not great, but with how hard the cast manages to pull, it’s not the bottom of the barrel. My main wish is that it had just gone harder. I truly don’t know why this was rated R, and I wish it had utilized that rating more to give us something that had some teeth and could blow our socks off. With more soul this would have been a fantastic standalone film, but instead we’re left with a fun enough entry to the “bring the teens to the theaters” film. Just slap the Conjuring name on it; people will watch anything with that. A frustrating mess of squandered potential.