There’s a brief and ingenious sequence involving the wavering transparency of Samantha’s clear-plastic umbrella. He stokes fear with simple and striking effects-round mirrors and oval windows that are the portals to apparitions who break them to reach their victims, trances that are dramatized with a chilling sparseness, hand-cranked car windows that open on their own and set their handles turning, ordinary hen’s eggs that harbor horrors. “The Curse of La Llorona” is Chaves’s first feature. Now wandering through eternity in search of other children to take their place, she begins to threaten and terrify Anna and the children. She is a Medea-like figure who, to avenge her husband’s infidelity, killed their children and then herself. It’s then that La Llorona makes an appearance. But there’s little safety for them in the religious facility where they’re temporarily housed, and when Anna is called in again, in the middle of the night, she has to have her children-her son, Chris (Roman Christou), who’s about ten, and her daughter, Samantha (Jaynee-Lynne Kinchen), who’s about six-in tow, in the back seat of her car. Anna finds them terrified, scarred both mentally and physically, and has them removed from their home. The movie, written by Mikki Daughtry and Tobias Iaconis, lightly but clearly outlines her tensions at work, caused by the stress of being a single mother and also by her devotion to her job, as seen in her visit to a woman named Patricia Alvarez (Patricia Velasquez), the single mother of two young sons who have been absent from school.
The woman, Anna, is a child-services case worker and a widow-her late husband was a police officer who was killed in the line of duty. Cut to Los Angeles, 1973, where a woman (Linda Cardellini) is rushing through her pleasant and modest house with her two children to get them out the door in time to catch the school bus-a mad morning dash that the movie’s director, Michael Chaves, realizes in a single long and darting Steadicam shot, already a venerable cliché but one that he invests with energy and sweetness. The title character, the “weeping woman,” the central figure in an actual Mexican legend, is shown in an introductory sequence, set in Mexico, in 1673: first in a cheerful family scene, with a young mother, her two boys, and a man next as one of her sons wanders in a glade, spies her drowning his brother, and then is caught by her, too. The air of physical authenticity goes far to lend a slender and underwrought story a solidity, an emotional precision that makes its narrow dramatic focus all the more regrettable. Scary it isn’t, but the latest movie in the “Conjuring” franchise, “The Curse of La Llorona,” is suspenseful, atmospheric, clever, and substantial in the literal sense of the word: it conveys the impression that it’s taking place where people live, and it draws its tension from clearly sketched practicalities.
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