My dear readers, though I am happy to report that much of my home life as a child was as peaceful as could be, there were occasional flurries of nervous activity. To provide but one example, at one time my father became convinced that our neighbors were unfathomable rogues with scant regard for our privacy. He swore he could see them sneaking cheeky glances through the windows, keeping a close watch on our behavior from their porch and shuffling through our mail before we had a chance to retrieve it. In fact, he became quite convinced that their insidious observations had some darker purpose and he broke into their house on an almost nightly basis, rummaging about for evidence that of their nefarious designs. Though he never returned home with the proof he sought, he remained convinced that they were incorrigible busybodies and cursed their invasive nature all the day long. 

Anna (Linda Cardellini) also knows a thing or two about nosing around in other people’s business. As a social worker, she finds it to be something of a professional necessity and in her latest case, her snooping reveals that a single mother (Patricia Velasquez) has padlocked her two young boys in a closet decorated with eyes. The mother assures her that this is done for their protection but Anna is a bit closed minded when it comes to alternative parenting strategies and suggest that the little lads spend a bit of time away from home. Though this notion makes the boys somber and their mother hysterical, Anna is rather convinced that this separation is for the best. 

And so she is quite distraught to discover the boys drowned in a shallow pool after a single night in a government facility. Shortly afterwards, Anna’s own children begin to exhibit peculiar behavior and pop up with unexplained injuries, circumstances that draw some difficult questions from her social working peers. All of this rich irony is eventually credited to La Llorna (Marisol Ramirez), a supernatural figure from South American folklore who drowned her own children and now wanders about eternally, snatching up wee youngsters to replace the ones she lost. La Lorna isn’t terribly familiar to North American audiences and Anna has an absolutely rotten time convincing her co-workers that her children’s traumatized bearing and inexplicable wounds are the result of a cross-country haunting.

The Curse of La Llorona is another well-polished production from the producers of the Conjuring series. Their cinematic accounts of Edward and Lorraine Warren were so successful that the studios have insisted on developing an entire “Conjuring Universe,” a universe very much like our own but with far more exorcisms. Like other films in this ever-expanding cosmos, The Curse of La Llorna is built around comfortably familiar scare tactics involving unreliable reflective surfaces and malfunctioning light sources. At times, it seems, these are employed at a somewhat oppressive rate and few scenes seem to pass without building towards some type of fright. While some less seasoned viewers might see this as an imbalance of sorts, director Michael Chaves is obviously using this tactic to simulate the aquatic suffocation that Ms. Lorna prefers. By offering very little breathing room for characters or dialogue, the viewer is treated to a most persuasive simulation of La Llorna’s particular horror presence. I can only hope that this universe of Conjuring can continue to produce such well-tailored experiences. 

The Curse of La Llorona runs 93 minutes and is rated R for violence and terror.