The Curse Of The Weeping Woman (2019) - Movie Review

While Marvel and DC continue to hash it out for the place of the kingpin of mainstream superhero cinema, horror has its own monarchy: The Conjuring Universe. Not since the days of Saw consistently blowing up the Halloween schedule has James Wan had this tight of a stranglehold on mainstream horror, having fingerprints on The Conjuring, Annabelle, last year’s The Nun, not to mention outliers like the Insidious series as well as the bane of my existence that is Lights Out. Today’s film technically doesn’t fall under the Conjuring canon, but through a brief inclusion of Annabelle herself, it still has a marked place within it. Think of it as the Redman to the larger universe’s Wu-Tang Clan, or (in more genre-appropriate terms) what The Marked Ones was for Paranormal Activity.

With how spotty the Conjuring universe has been to date, with an unfortunate ratio where most of the spin-offs have been rather sub-par, this film has an uphill struggle right from the start to make its own existence worthy. And when looking at it in pure genre terms, it turns out a lot better than it has any right to. Its approach to horror does admittedly rely on jump scares, but credit to debut director Michael Chaves in how he treats those jolts to the system.

He appears savvy enough about the trope to actively play with the audience’s expectations, letting some foreseen scares loose while letting others play out longer so the tension stays taut. And even when the scares happen, they don’t rely solely on Peter Gvozdas’ editing or Joseph Bishara’s soundtrack to make their impact, even letting some creepy images linger without drawing immediate attention to them. It’s a pretty cool showcase of how to do justice to what is a rather irksome style of filmmaking these days.

From there, the acting is decent if nothing all that special. Linda Cardellini as a Child Protective Services employee (we’ll get more into that in a bit)/mother of two children works okay as the maternal core for the story, while Patricia Velásquez as one of her cases shows a rather unsettling flipside to that as a frightened and occasionally malicious parental figure. Roman Christou and Jaynee-Lynne Kinchen as the children do decently, as does Raymond Cruz as an ex-priest who gives the film some much needed levity during the bombastic third act. And then there’s Marisol Ramirez as the titular ghost, who honestly represents the lesser of the creature acting we’ve seen so far. Not to say it’s bad, just that it doesn’t measure up to what else we’ve seen from this collection.

As for the main story, it’s a bit plain overall as far as stories about families being haunted by the ghost of the week. However, right at the start, something weird happens: We learn of the involvement of the CPS in the main story. To say that the CPS is usually demonized in cinema would be a gross understatement, typically used in horror films as a vehicle to gaslight the victims (and by proxy the audience) into thinking that maybe the threat is far more tangible than anything to do with ghosts or demons.

That isn’t the case here, though. This might be the least hostile depiction I’ve seen of CPS in a horror film in a very long time. But why this approach as opposed to what is worryingly the standard? Well, this is where the children’s place in the narrative unearths some interesting ideas. After encountering La Llorona and being marked, their diminished recounts to the adults show a certain… pattern. Glassy-eyed looks, supreme unease in even thinking about what happened, hesitance as if they’re still trying to come to terms with what happened. This makes sense as far as reactions to the supernatural, but it also aligns with something even darker: Reactions to being abused, the kind of situation that the CPS investigates regularly. The kind of situation that, while far less fantastical than visits from the supernatural, can prove just as difficult for a child to process.

Once that parallel kicks in, and we learn more about La Llorona and how she became a spectre, it raises some disturbing questions in regards to how much faith children put in adults, especially their caregivers. How frightening it has to be to put your safety in the hands of someone you’re told can be trusted… only for them to inflict the very damage you hoped they would save you from. With how straight-forward the storytelling in this can get, this kind of subtext would likely have gotten more mileage out of something more willing to venture into the darkness; this isn’t The Babadook we’re talking about here. But the fact that it exists here at all, attached to a pretty decent flick, gives this film a surprising amount of agency, enough to make it worth checking out for those with a liking for the Conjuring Universe.