The Curse of the Weeping Woman: Blu Ray Review

The Curse of the Weeping Woman: Blu Ray Review

The Conjuring Universe continues to expand out with this latest, a solid but formulaic piece of fright fare that doesn't quite build on its promising premise.

Sacrificing subtleties in favour of providing the Weeping Woman as a punchline to most scenes, The Curse of La Llorona deals with some dark issues - infanticide, suspected abuse, repressed grief as it spins the tale of recently widowed Anna Tate-Garcia (Scooby Doo and ER star Linda Cardinelli).

A social worker, Anna's called in to try and help the children of Patricia Alvarez who show signs of abuse. But when the children are found killed, drowned in a local lake, Anna's sanity begins to be questioned when a folktale of La Llorona, who takes children, appears to becoming true.

The Curse of The Weeping Woman is relatively taut, and as mentioned, hints at some real darkness, before ultimately deciding to sideline that in favour of rote scares.

By keeping the film's point of view within Anna's family alone, there's a palpable sense of claustrophobia as the jolts start to come. And Chaves makes some good fist of a few visual tricks to build a creeping sense of terror. But much like any fairground horror house, he can't resist the pull of the cheap scares, and that's where The Curse of The Weeping Woman starts to fall down, as every scene becomes punctuated by Ramirez's ghost popping into frame.

It's lazy at best and detracts from some genuinely unsettling edges which are displayed throughout. It's a shame the psychological edges aren't mined more, for a deeply upsetting denouement.

From a bathtub sequence to a final housebound showdown, the film's successes come from making the most of the surroundings and some of the genre tropes.

Unfortunately, in bringing in Cruz's former priest, the script settles for laughs and one-liners when the truly terrifying touch would have been to continue on with the darkness that's hinted at - suspense, suspicions and susceptible children make great bedfellows for any decent horror movie, but The Curse of The Weeping Woman doesn't seem content enough to push the boundaries, jettisoning the narratively beefy for the frighteningly familiar.

It's by no means a disaster, and offers the requisite thrills for what you'd expect, but at times, this mash up of The Exorcist and The Nun starts to feel horrendously like a horrific case of deja vu, and worryingly points to the Conjuring Universe potentially running out of tricks to pull on its audience, who are all too willing to go along for the ride.