La Llorona (2019)
Sabrina De La Hoz, Margarita Kenéfic, Julio Diaz, Ayla-Elea Hurtado, María Mercedes Coroy, María Telón, Juan Pablo Olyslager
Directed by: Jayro Bustamante

Shudder has a tendency to dub movies that aren’t in English and I absolutely hate it. I’ll actually stop it, no matter how much I want to see it. I’ll pick the actor’s real voice every time, even if I don’t speak the language. Anyways, I was happy to see that this film wasn’t dubbed. And, oh boy, was it one of the very few things I actually liked about it.

Retired general Enrique and his family must face the truth of his actions and the sense that a supernatural force is targeting them for his crimes during the Mayan genocide.

This movie does have some good going for it. The story is actually excellent, although I seem to remember the La Llorona story being something quite different. Hold, let me go look it up… Ok, yes, it is different. Here’s what Google had to say about it: “La Llorona, or the Weeping Woman, is a famous ghost in Hispanic and Mexican folklore. The legend says a heartbroken or angry woman named Maria drowns her children in a river after her husband leaves her. She then kills herself. Cursed to wander the earth, her ghost cries out for her lost children near water.” (If a version of this sounds familiar, it’s because Supernatural’s pilot episode was about this, except they called her a Woman in White.) Water still features prominently in the story, just not quite in this way.

This, in my opinion, would have made a fantastic short film, maybe half an hour long. But there are just so many long shots of little to nothing happening that I was begging for something to happen. I spoke out loud to my tv, “something, anything, please, just stub your toe, even, come on”. I do enjoy a good slow burn, but this was glacial. The acting was mostly pretty good, and it did have some good looking shots.

I actually knew nothing of the real-world events that inspired this film. I thought that this was going to be a period piece, set during conquest. I was actually quite upset that it wasn’t! Looking it up after the fact and boy, do humans ever suck. Wouldn’t it really be nice for vengeful ghosts to come around and take care of these people?

So, do I recommend it? No, not really. It’s slow and mostly boring. It’s got a good final 10 minutes, but it’s not enough to save it. I give it a (generous) 4/10.

M.

This film is currently streaming on Shudder and AMC+.