The Curse of the Weeping Woman takes that Conjuring formula and blends it with a very intimate fear shared by many parents: that there is something out there that will harm their children.
It’s time to get a little personal here. A week or so ago, I had an incredibly intense nightmare, in which I stood over the graves of my two children. My sobs were so loud that I woke-up my wife, who comforted me and assured it was all a bad dream. For days this nightmare haunted me, not only for its deep emotional impact, but for the fact that even though this was a product of my subconscious, I felt like a failure. I could not do the most prominent of parental tasks: protect my children.
The Curse of the Weeping Woman (known as The Curse of La Llorona in North America) deals with this very issue. Its story follows Anna Tate-Garcia (Linda Cardellini), a recently widowed social worker raising her two children Chris (Roman Christos) and Samantha (Jaynee-Lynne Kinchen). When a suspected case of child abuse results in the death of two young children and the incarceration of their mother (Patricia Velasquez), little does the unsuspecting Anna know that the vengeful ghost La Llorona (Marisol Ramirez) is responsible for their deaths, and this malevolent force has now set her sights on Chris and Samantha.
Director Michael Chaves stridently follows the formula set by James Wan in his Conjuring universe. Jump scares, creepy atmosphere, and a good dose of religious doctrine all feature throughout. Yet The Curse of the Weeping Woman also has a primal emotion to its horror that parents will particularly tune into. Children have long been the targets of all matter of pesky ghost ghoul, ranging from clowns (It) to demented preachers (Poltergeist II). The Curse of the Weeping Woman adds a new monster to the pantheon with La Llorona, a creepy apparition that can be described as The White Lady ghost with a Latino twist and a thirst for the souls of young children.
Parents everywhere know that there is all matter of monster out there, somewhere, that want to harm their children. But how to contend with a spiritual being whose creepy, manipulative nature is exceeded only by its violence? Chavez, along with screenwriters Mikki Daughtry and Tobias Iaconis (Five Feet Apart) create and execute creepy scenarios to show just how insignificant a baseball bat wielding mama is when swinging at nothing. They also provide scenarios of frustrating stupidity. Exactly why any parent who has witnessed a nightmarish ghost encounter would leave their children in varied vulnerable situations is beyond the most patient of horror fan.
Never the less, The Curse of the Weeping Woman works in satisfyingly presenting the stakes at play and its strong portrayal of a family unit under duress. It also has one hell of a spiritual warrior in the form of a disillusioned priest with all matter of tricks and incantations, portrayed by long time character actor Raymond Cruz. He brings a quiet cool to the proceedings especially when things get suitably, predictably noisy in the eventual confrontation between good and evil. Unlike The Nun before it, The Curse of the Weeping Woman spin-off presents such moments with a strong emotion core that compliments the scares.
