Cry me a river
Back before The Curse of La Llorona came out in 2019, I used that as a catalyst to explore every horror movie featuring the Latin American legend. I watched 18 different movies from across decades and cultures to compare and contrast how they handled La Llorona, the Weeping Woman who hangs out by the river looking for her drowned children and just might mistake you for her kids and drown you too if you go out there after dark. I even wrote about the 5 best entries here. One thing that I learned (too late) is that if you end your marathon with a new big-budget film, you instantly miss all the follow-up movies that haunt Redbox with grabby titles attempting to pass themselves off as said big-budget film. Hence 2022's The Legend of La Llorona, rather late to the party, but the pandemic probably had a little something to do with that.
Another thing I learned over the course of that series was that female directors have the best handle on the character on average. The legend can either be read as a cautionary tale of female hysteria or an anti-colonialist yarn about an indigenous woman driven to murder by a cruel Spanish conquistador who uses her and then spurns her. Guess who prefers the former. So while I wouldn't say I was excited for The Legend of La Llorona, which was helmed by Canadian television director Patricia Harris Seeley, I was at least cautiously optimistic.
Well, one thing I can say in defense of the film, which was written by Jose Prendes from a story by Cameron Larson, is that it doesn't feel all that misogynistic. It is misogynistic, but it puts all its xenophobia front and center and that's something that all the other problems can comfortably hide behind. The film follows The Candlewoods, an American family who has come to live for a month in a small-town villa in Mexico. They have clearly come so Carly (Autumn Reeser) can process the death of their daughter in childbirth, because Andrew (Antonio Cupo) is at the end of his rope what with her still grieving this loss eight whole months later and The Yellow Wallpaper-ing her way all over the place. Also, they have a young son named Danny (Nicolas Madrazo) who almost instantly gets half-drowned in the nearby canal and starts babbling about the woman in white (Zamia Fandiño) under the water.
The film's sole Mexican characters of note are as follows: Jorge (Danny Trejo) is a cab driver and all-around protective guardian angel who exists to serve the white family at all hours. Veronica (Angélica Lara) is their housekeeper who has a connection with the spirit world, because a Latina woman in a horror movie couldn't possibly play another type of role even in her own goddamn country. Pedro Pablo (Edgar Wuotto) is a gangbanger with a cartel who wants to kidnap Danny and sell him into the sex trade. Mexico! Somehow all of this feels less racist than the scene where a carsick Danny throws up at the thought of authentic local cuisine or (good god) the line that forces poor Danny Trejo to utter the spine-tingling phrase "the La Llorona." Also, [SPOILER ALERT] the final line goes - and I'm quoting, here - "Let's get back to Los Angeles, where things actually make sense."
One sec, gotta get this off my chest: Fuck The Legend of La Llorona.
OK, moving on.
In addition to being a mess of horrible racial caricatures, it's also just a regular mess. In an early scene, Danny Trejo moves his head in a way that the camera lens does not like, apparently, because it abstracts his head into a double image blur for a horrible half second. This is a way for filmmaking to go wrong that I haven't ever fathomed could be possible. I've seen films where what seems like a wig's worth of hair gets in the gate of the camera for an entire scene, or you can see a boom mic operator scratching their ass behind the stalking alien. But this has literally never happened to my eyes. It's by far the worst technical element of the film, which is mostly content to exist in lamentable, despairing blandness before the third act, in which they pump a bunch of "Platinum Dunes horror remake" fog into the scene and slap a blue filter over everything. An actual line from the film sums this look up perfectly: "Look at the light... Is it dawn? Or a blue hell?"
It's not only an abject failure as a Llorona movie (it bogs up her mythology with needless personal details that service a nonsense twist about her not actually having killed her child that made me finally understand what reactionary Catholics felt like when The Da Vinci Code came out), it fails to present its villain as a comprehensible presence in her own right. La Llorona is alternately presented as a sort of fanged water nymph, a veiled bride behind a wall of CGI fog who screeches like a pterodactyl, or a mom in a bathrobe with the power to Force Choke people like she's Darth Vader. None of these things form a coherent whole, and no piece of what she's presented as is in any way scary.
All I can say is that those looking for a dash of bad-good spice will certainly get a kick out of the screenplay. Between the heavy-handed exposition, overwritten marital conflicts, and tossed-off casual lines that are somehow more inexplicable than everything else ("Danny would really love this place," his father comments while walking into a local bar), there is plenty of material to mine here. However, at the end of the day, there are hundreds of other movies better suited for that purpose that are less soul-suckingly grim to sit through.
But Danny Trejo does shoot a ghost in the face with a shotgun, so there is that.
Brennan Klein is a millennial who knows way more about 80's slasher movies than he has any right to. He's a former host of the Attack of the Queerwolf podcast and a current senior movie/TV news writer at Screen Rant. You can find his other reviews on his blog Popcorn Culture. Follow him on Twitter or Letterboxd, if you feel like it.
Another thing I learned over the course of that series was that female directors have the best handle on the character on average. The legend can either be read as a cautionary tale of female hysteria or an anti-colonialist yarn about an indigenous woman driven to murder by a cruel Spanish conquistador who uses her and then spurns her. Guess who prefers the former. So while I wouldn't say I was excited for The Legend of La Llorona, which was helmed by Canadian television director Patricia Harris Seeley, I was at least cautiously optimistic.
Well, one thing I can say in defense of the film, which was written by Jose Prendes from a story by Cameron Larson, is that it doesn't feel all that misogynistic. It is misogynistic, but it puts all its xenophobia front and center and that's something that all the other problems can comfortably hide behind. The film follows The Candlewoods, an American family who has come to live for a month in a small-town villa in Mexico. They have clearly come so Carly (Autumn Reeser) can process the death of their daughter in childbirth, because Andrew (Antonio Cupo) is at the end of his rope what with her still grieving this loss eight whole months later and The Yellow Wallpaper-ing her way all over the place. Also, they have a young son named Danny (Nicolas Madrazo) who almost instantly gets half-drowned in the nearby canal and starts babbling about the woman in white (Zamia Fandiño) under the water.
The film's sole Mexican characters of note are as follows: Jorge (Danny Trejo) is a cab driver and all-around protective guardian angel who exists to serve the white family at all hours. Veronica (Angélica Lara) is their housekeeper who has a connection with the spirit world, because a Latina woman in a horror movie couldn't possibly play another type of role even in her own goddamn country. Pedro Pablo (Edgar Wuotto) is a gangbanger with a cartel who wants to kidnap Danny and sell him into the sex trade. Mexico! Somehow all of this feels less racist than the scene where a carsick Danny throws up at the thought of authentic local cuisine or (good god) the line that forces poor Danny Trejo to utter the spine-tingling phrase "the La Llorona." Also, [SPOILER ALERT] the final line goes - and I'm quoting, here - "Let's get back to Los Angeles, where things actually make sense."
One sec, gotta get this off my chest: Fuck The Legend of La Llorona.
OK, moving on.
In addition to being a mess of horrible racial caricatures, it's also just a regular mess. In an early scene, Danny Trejo moves his head in a way that the camera lens does not like, apparently, because it abstracts his head into a double image blur for a horrible half second. This is a way for filmmaking to go wrong that I haven't ever fathomed could be possible. I've seen films where what seems like a wig's worth of hair gets in the gate of the camera for an entire scene, or you can see a boom mic operator scratching their ass behind the stalking alien. But this has literally never happened to my eyes. It's by far the worst technical element of the film, which is mostly content to exist in lamentable, despairing blandness before the third act, in which they pump a bunch of "Platinum Dunes horror remake" fog into the scene and slap a blue filter over everything. An actual line from the film sums this look up perfectly: "Look at the light... Is it dawn? Or a blue hell?"
It's not only an abject failure as a Llorona movie (it bogs up her mythology with needless personal details that service a nonsense twist about her not actually having killed her child that made me finally understand what reactionary Catholics felt like when The Da Vinci Code came out), it fails to present its villain as a comprehensible presence in her own right. La Llorona is alternately presented as a sort of fanged water nymph, a veiled bride behind a wall of CGI fog who screeches like a pterodactyl, or a mom in a bathrobe with the power to Force Choke people like she's Darth Vader. None of these things form a coherent whole, and no piece of what she's presented as is in any way scary.
All I can say is that those looking for a dash of bad-good spice will certainly get a kick out of the screenplay. Between the heavy-handed exposition, overwritten marital conflicts, and tossed-off casual lines that are somehow more inexplicable than everything else ("Danny would really love this place," his father comments while walking into a local bar), there is plenty of material to mine here. However, at the end of the day, there are hundreds of other movies better suited for that purpose that are less soul-suckingly grim to sit through.
But Danny Trejo does shoot a ghost in the face with a shotgun, so there is that.
Brennan Klein is a millennial who knows way more about 80's slasher movies than he has any right to. He's a former host of the Attack of the Queerwolf podcast and a current senior movie/TV news writer at Screen Rant. You can find his other reviews on his blog Popcorn Culture. Follow him on Twitter or Letterboxd, if you feel like it.
Categories: horror, scary ghosties
