Huesera: The Bone Woman Review: An Evocative Portrait of Maternal Fear and Anxiety

The film is a sensitive character study disguised as an unnerving exercise in body horror.

Huesera: The Bone Woman
Photo: XYZ Films

Michelle Garza Cervera’s feature-length directorial debut, Huesera: The Bone Woman, is a sensitive character study disguised as an unnerving exercise in body horror. Valeria (Natalia Solián), a furniture maker living an ostensibly happy existence in Mexico, is expecting her first child with her husband, Raúl (Alfonso Dosal). Reluctant to embrace the prospect of motherhood, she finds herself haunted by nightmarish visions of faceless people, leading her to believe that she’s in the throes of a demonic possession.

But just when it seems as if Huesera is settling into a repetitive series of frights that allegorize the fear of impending parenthood, Garza Cervera shrewdly broadens the film’s perspective to present a complex portrait of her tortured heroine’s life. Despite Valeria’s unsettling hallucinations of demons snapping her limbs—informed by a comment made to her about what the process of childbirth does to the body—Huesera’s most startling moment arguably comes with an abrupt flashback revealing Valeria as a rebellious teenager who openly disdained domesticity. Valeria even secretly reconnects with her ex-girlfriend, Octavia (played by Mayra Batalla in the present-day scenes), with whom she once planned to run away with.

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The flashback reframes our perception of Valeria by suggesting that her breakdown isn’t solely informed by her pregnancy. Rather, it’s ultimately the final straw that pushes the character over the edge, since she’s gone against her desires and begrudgingly agreed to devote herself to the traditional role of wife and mother. Valeria’s reluctance is made evident when Garza Cervera ties it to the severity of the woman’s hallucinations. And nowhere is this more terrifying than when Valeria attempts to play house and babysit her rambunctious niece and nephew, only to suffer from a particularly intense vision of being attacked by a horde of demons.

The oppressive weight of conformity is even conveyed through Garza Cervera’s sense of mise-en-scène, albeit to varying levels of success. As indicated by the opening scene depicting Valeria and her mother (Aída López) and sister (Sonia Couoh) visiting a giant statue of the Virgin Mary and praying for fertility, the expectation and pressure on Valeria to be a mother is very much rooted in family and culture. Conversely, Garza Cervera often heavy-handedly belabors the symbolism of spiderwebs within Valeria’s house to suggest her entrapment.

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If this clunky analogy feels unnecessary, that’s because the context surrounding Valeria’s life is delineated with perfect lucidity. In short, we understand the tragic circumstance of a woman going through the motions of a life she never desired without the symbolic handholding. And because of this, the seemingly innocuous environments of conventional domesticity effectively take on as much suffocating terror as the monsters that suffuse Valeria’s nightmares.

Score: 
 Cast: Natalia Solián, Alfonso Dosal, Mayra Batalla, Aída López, Sonia Couoh  Director: Michelle Garza Cervera  Screenwriter: Abia Castillo, Michelle Garza Cervera  Distributor: XYZ Films  Running Time: 97 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2022

Wes Greene

Wes Greene is a film writer based out of Philadelphia.

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