Huesera: The Bone Woman
The buzzed-about Mexican folk body horror film is now on Shudder.
Michelle Garza’s body horror film focuses on a specific mindset attributed to the traditional family unit, when Valeria (Natalia Solián) becomes pregnant with her husband Raul (Alfonso Dosal). They’ve been trying for some time and following the good news they prepare as any expecting parents would. But Valeria has started to see strange things she can’t explain and her mind starts to become affected by an unknown force.
In an astonishing feature-length debut, Michelle Garza Cervera weaves a light folk horror layer over the very real fears of becoming a mother in a life Valerie has made for herself but doesn’t feel like it’s the right one for her. She grapples with the impending finality of passing a milestone most would never look back from, but her past looks somewhat brighter in the rear view the further she becomes entrenched in familial obligation.
There’s an incongruity at work that aspires to create one cobbled-together visual style and it excels at invoking not only a sense of dread and great sadness, but a paranoid uneasiness that seeps into the psyche just as effectively as it does for Valeria. Encounters with Raul and her family members see Valeria in comforting, warmly lit environments with accents of natural lighting. Valeria’s old stomping grounds, where her ex Octavia (Mayra Batalla) still lives frequently is photographed under the evening light of darkness, as if to use that darkness to nudge Valeria away from the apparent danger & unpredictability her old life attracted. But at points the film deliberately splits the frame into equal thirds, placing Valeria at different times both in each section and in all three. The woman split into three here being the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone in the film’s most obvious visual references. Yet it never goes into expository spells explaining the visual or thematic significance of this; Huesera feels confident in its audience sensing where it wants to take us.
In the film, a flashback shows Valeria’s night and day (literally in the visual sense) shift from a troubled youth to a pregnant, outwardly stable housewife. It explores a bit of this volatile, fabricated societal dividing line between these two worlds but the film presses forward in an entirely new hell for Valeria. Since becoming pregnant she witnesses a woman across the street leap from her balcony in the middle of the night. Figures on the edge of her vision slink and contort unnaturally, invading her home and causing her to question everything she sees. Of course her concerns are mansplained away by her husband and doctor as just part of being pregnant, but we know as well as Valeria that this is much more than that.
Huesera’s first half is by far the most stable and engrossing portion, dropping us into Valeria’s life during this moment of change. But as things begin to sway under the weight of it all what Valeria sees pulls her into near-forgotten memories from before her perfect married life in the present. It’s not often we see a horror film use a flashback to give us a completely different outlook on our main character. Usually these sequences are relegated to delivering backstory using the “show, don’t tell” rule as its roadmap but not in any truly clever or interesting way. When we come back to the present we’ve measured Valeria in an impressive depth that it’s easy to forget she has a life-altering journey ahead of her still.
In her concern for her own health and the baby’s, Valeria’s aunt Isabel (Mercedes Hernández) refers her to a bruja to investigate. In a scene where the evil presence menacing Valeria is just beginning to become identified by an expert, she rejects it all and goes back to her life hoping it will just go away. It’s a little refreshing that the standard proceedings for folk horror that deal with something not quite corporeal are mixed up a bit in Valeria’s bullish convictions that seem to borrow a bit from conventions seen in film noir. But to say that Valeria’s personal journey here is completely unique would be a fabrication. Her family only sees her breaking down since the conception of her child, with Valeria becoming unable to equip herself for the plans she’s made for her future. And it’s by the film’s end that the promise of dread and sadness is reaped. But a sad end doesn’t dictate a sad life. It just makes it hard for a while.
Huesera: The Bone Woman is now on Shudder.
