REVIEW: Huesera: The Bone Woman
Director Michelle Garza Cervera’s feature debut expertly mines horror from the pains of motherhood and the travails of gender expectations
by Michael Zendejas
There’s a lot that makes Huesera: The Bone Woman, Michelle Garza Cervera’s 2022 feature directorial debut, truly impressive. There’s the film’s critical success, which included over fifteen Ariel Award nominations and immediately cemented Cervera as one of Mexican cinema’s most exciting new voices. There’s the panoply of thoughtfully balanced and explored themes: motherhood, family, gender roles, sexuality, even history and colonialism. But the thing that’s so stunning about Huesera is that from these familiar components, Cervera has crafted a work that feels so wildly intimate and singular.
Huesera is centered around a first-time mother, Valeria (Natalia Solián), who finally becomes pregnant after many failed attempts—only to discover she and her child might be in the crosshairs of an otherworldly danger. As Valeria’s paranoia grows, so does her inability to fit into society’s idea of a perfect life. Part scathing critique of gender expectations in Mexico, part heart-racing supernatural horror, this movie has a lot to say and is likely to stay with viewers long after the credits roll.
The film’s deft use of tone and atmosphere combine to keep viewers on the edge of their seats throughout the film, with particular attention paid to the expert sound design. On the one hand, the audio mix ensures you won’t ever miss key information or emotional and aesthetic cues—be they whispered prayers, the wind in the leaves, or the snap and pop of bones—but Cervera still finds ways to play with sound levels to keep audiences feeling as off-balance and harried as the characters themselves. Voices fade in and out, sometimes drowned beneath layers of ambient noises; it’s as if we ourselves are processing the dissociation and shock alongside Valeria. This added layer of interiority brings us further into her character’s state of mind, dramatically heightening tensions even as Valeria begins to experience terrifying visions. The film also makes great use of silence, keeping viewers in suspense without ever granting the easy out of a conventional jump scare. Our fear becomes as immediate and graspable as Valeria’s, creating a thorough immersion that is bolstered by a tightly written yet beautifully efficient script.
Of particular note are the exposition and backstory that Cervera and co-writer Abia Castillo are able to sneak into the film. In a lesser film, these aspects could easily have become tedious or overly-explanatory, taking viewers out of the moment and all that carefully built-up tension. But this is a challenge Huesera ably navigates. Keeping flashbacks and direct explanations to a minimum, the film instead allows the action to unfold before our eyes, without hand-holding or unnecessary embellishment. A shared glance with an old flame, a gentle zoom-in on Valeria’s disappointed expression: Cervera is forever finding ways to convey that her protagonist’s life isn’t shaping up at all how she wants it to. The film never outright names the problem she has with her comfortable bourgeois life, just like the demon chasing her is never named—instead, we’re led to understand it through Cervera’s trust in the combined power of imagery and purposeful dialogue.
Huesera compares the experience of becoming a mother to feeling your own bones break.
At one point, we see Valeria’s husband laugh at the fact that the baby’s room is her former workroom, despite his wife’s obvious unhappiness about giving up her carpentry hobby. Through interactions like this, we’re shown repeated glimpses of the ways women are expected to give up, hide, or abandon central parts of themselves and encouraged to enter institutions like marriage or motherhood without a second thought. Huesera is not a film that hides the pain of such transitions, and at one point even compares the experience of becoming a mother to feeling your own bones break. It’s ultimately a film that delves deeply into how excruciating, yet fulfilling, it can be to resist these societal pressures to conform (keeping in theme with punk rock’s prominence on the soundtrack). It doesn’t hurt that the precise screenwriting with which these themes are conveyed is animated by a cast that finds ways to add layer upon layer of humanity to this film.
Natalia Solián is phenomenal in the leading role, fully embodying Valeria and bringing an astounding level of commitment to every second she’s on-screen. Each line carries a perfect blend of melancholy and fear, transforming her character’s paranoia into an almost palpable force throughout the film. The supporting cast is just as fantastic, including the iconic Mercedes Hernández as Valeria’s closeted aunt, Isabel. Hernández gives a performance that’s stoic, yet filled with the pain that comes from a lifetime of hiding. Her character, too, becomes central to the story, a fellow black sheep who guides Valeria through a world of dark magic and familial trauma, all captured by controlled yet stunning visuals.
The camera is often still, but cinematographer Nur Rubio Sherwell displays an incredible ability to compose each shot with care and deliberation, providing jarring tableaus that function like peeks into the characters’ wounded psyches. The use of a handheld camera in certain sequences is especially dynamic, alternately providing a kind of gentle subjectivity or injecting energy into the frame. The film’s deftly composed lighting switches frequently from an almost honey-tinted color to a colder blue, which helps drive home each change in tone (while also, conveniently, making the blood more apparent). The editing, too, comes up for some heavy lifting—one of the film’s few flashbacks shows a young Valeria with her punk rocker friends running from the cops, shouting their refusal to be domesticated, before cutting to a quiet shot of Valeria as an adult, alone in the bedroom of her child-to-be. These visual and formal choices, combined with a script that’s clearly deeply interested in the inner lives and feelings of its characters, come together to provide some of the most exhilarating and thought-provoking moments one could hope for in our current theatrical landscape.
Since premiering at last year’s Tribeca Festival, Huesera has received almost exclusively positive reviews… and rightly so. It’s a smartly written delve into the human impacts of a deeply heteronormative and patriarchal system. As the rights of women and LGBTQ+ people all over the world are in danger, the concerns of this movie ring with even more urgency and humanity. Amidst a wave of ongoing repression, Huesera: The Bone Woman lays bare this violent devastation, while still finding ways to highlight the beauty of resistance. In short, this is a film not to be missed.
Michael Zendejas runs the Chicano Film Shelf blog. His work is featured or forthcoming in: North American Review, Film & History Journal, EcoTheo Review and more. Follow him @Mikeafff
