Feb 161933
 
one reel
cryingwoman1933

After a man dies at night from the cry of a woman, Don Fernando (Paco MartĂ­nez) tells his nephew Dr. Ricardo de Acuna (RamĂłn Pereda) of the great danger his child is in. All the first born sons of the family die when they are four years old. He claims this is due to a curse placed on the family when their ancestor refused to acknowledge his mistress and child, resulting in her killing herself and the boy. A hidden book connects the curse to an indigenous princess in the time of the conquistadors, who swears vengeance after her son is stolen by the Spanish.

The folktale of La Llorona is well known in Central America. An indigenous woman is taken as a lover by an upper-class Spaniard, and then abandoned. In rage and grief, she murders her children and wastes away, becoming a white-clad, weeping woman, wandering the night killing children, or in some versions, killing anyone who she meets. The legend deserves a better film.

The strange treatment of La Llorona doesn’t help. We are shown two separate ghosts, but neither, in ghostly form, play any role in the “main” story. One kills an unknown man at the beginning, but otherwise the curse is carried out by cultists (or the descendants of the princess’s loyal servants if you prefer), one of whom is apparently possessed. Why not stick with the ghost?

The doctor’s behavior is also ridiculous. Sure, I’m with him in discounting a supernatural answer, but if every single first born of my family had died at age 4, then I’d come up with something better than “hey, it’s a big family and tragedies happen. ” This guy’s in deep denial.

Then there is the house, which is so filled with wide hidden passageways and huge secret room, that either the film needed to have been shot in an expressionistic style, or it should have been a comedy.

But the larger problem is that no one involved had the skill to make a movie. Clearly the scriptwriter and set designer were in over their heads, but no more so than the actors, who seem to think they are in a soap opera. And they excel next to the camera man – although I suspect money was the problem there. Even if everything else had been passable, The Crying Woman dies in editing. It is slow, sometimes bizarrely so. Excessive time is spent showing children sitting at a birthday party and focusing on the priest at a wedding, while the horror aspects are rushed. Every scene is poorly edited. The entire film is 73 minute film, yet it uses 27 minutes of that for the first flashback and another 7 for the second, leaving very little time for the modern story or the “main” characters.

Neither creepy nor interesting, The Crying Woman is just boring and sad.