Director: Michael Chaves
Writers: Mikki Daughtry, Tobias Iaconis
Stars: Linda Cardellini, Raymond Cruz, Patricia Velasquez
Run Time: 1 Hour, 33 Minutes
Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/2uGXRm
Synopsis
Mexico 1673. Two little boys give their mother a pendant, and she says she will “keep it forever.” Somehow, one of the little boys gets separated from the others. He finds the mother drowning the other son, and then she does the same for him. Credits Roll.
We jump forward to 1973. Anna works for CPS, Child Protective Services, and she gets a call that the Alvarez children aren’t going to school. She also gets talked to by her boss for being late so often since her husband died. She goes over to the Alvarez house with a policeman in tow.
We can see that Mrs. Alvarez is weird because she has candles all over the house. Alvarez wanders off, leaving Anna to walk around the house looking for the boys. Anna finds a locked door, but opens it anyway. Inside, she finds the two boys, who are hiding inside. “Close the door,” they whisper. One of the boys has burn marks on his arm, and they both say “She did it,” but they don’t mean their mother. “We’re not safe anywhere,” the other one explains.
Anna misses her dead husband, a former police officer. Meanwhile, the two Alvarez boys are having a rough night at the CPS building. Tomas appears to be sleepwalking, and his little brother is trying to follow him. Then they both see something scary. Anna gets a call saying they just pulled the two boys out of the river, and they’re dead. She drags her own two children, Chris and Sam, with her to the crime scene. Mrs. Alvarez screams and says she tried to stop her. She tried to stop… La Llorona!
Chris gets out of the car to nose around and hears a woman weeping away from the crime scene. She sees him and homes in him. She grabs his arm, burning him the same way that the Alvarez boy was burned. He runs to the car and gets in, and she tries to get to him in the car, but he rolls the windows up. He thinks he was imagining the whole thing, even though he has a real burn on his arm.
Father Perez, the priest from the “Annabelle” film, explains the concept of “smudging” at the funeral for the Alvarez boys. Anna asks him about La Llorona, and he explains that she’s the “weeping woman,” and tells the legend. She murdered her own children, and now she roams the Earth in search of replacements.
At home, Anna’s daughter, Sam, now hears the weeping woman too. She can see her through the clear umbrella. The woman leaves her mark on the daughter as well.
Rafael, Mrs. Alvarez’s priest, investigates her now-empty home.
Anna starts hearing odd noises around the house. She catches Chris sleepwalking, and then she sees the woman.
The next day, Anna goes in to see Mrs. Alvarez. Alvarez blames Anna for her boys death, since she had the boys safely hidden. She told La Llarona to go after Anna’s children. Chris is hurt in an attack, and the hospital ironically ends up calling CPS on Anna. She still doesn’t tell Detective Cooper what she’s been going through.
The woman attacks again that night. Anna and the kids go to see Father Perez, and he tells them about Annabelle. He believes the La Llorona story. He can’t help her directly, but he knows a guy who used to be a priest and now might be able to help. It’s Rafael, who recognizes her from the Alvarez funeral.
He senses great evil in their house, but sets up candles and other magic defenses in the house. That night, she returns again, but Rafael drives her away. The woman grabs Sam, and Anna looks for her in the swimming pool. Anna grabs the woman’s pendant off her neck. Sam gets away, but she’s now under the woman’s control.
Mrs. Alvarez shows up with a gun, and she breaks the seal keeping the woman out. The kids hide in the attic, and when the woman attacks up there, Chris shows her the pendant, which turns La Llorona human-looking. Anna stabs her with a cross made of special wood, and the woman explodes in a gusher of black juice.
Commentary
I think maybe the theme of all these Conjuring movies is that living in the 1970s was just plain terrifying, far more so than life today. This was rated R, but there’s hardly any gore, no bad language or sex, and no one even died onscreen. Strange.
The acting was fine, the effects were good, and the jump scares were predictable, but not as numerous as the other Conjuring films. It was a pretty standard “haunting” type film, but nothing especially remarkable. The only link to the other Conjuring films was the story told by the priest, which feels a lot like it was shoehorned in there after the rest of the filming to make it fit in with the already-established series.