HUESERA: THE BONE WOMAN – Review by Nadine Whitney
The concept of rewilding primarily applies to allowing environmental areas return to natural state pre-intervention from humanity or industry. In Michelle Garza Cervera’s Huesera: The Bone Woman the concept can equally be applied to its once wild but now domesticated protagonist, Valeria (Natalia Solián) whose desire to fit in to an “aspirational” world becomes a source of utmost horror when she conceives a child with her husband Raúl (Alfonso Dosal).
Cervera begins the film with Val walking up a flight of punishing stairs to a huge shrine dedicated to Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City. Val’s mother Maricarmen (Aida López) prays to the virgin and blesses Val’s belly. The camera pulls away to reveal the dominating structure and then cuts to a woman on fire – a woman who is very different to the mother that overlooks the city.
Val has cultivated a middle-class life. The apartment she lives in is the epitome of expensive millennial-chic. It’s also owned by her mother-in-law. Val’s position in the home seems dependent on her ability to graciously acquiesce to the needs of others. When she finally becomes pregnant it is her workshop that will be converted into a nursery, not her husband’s hobby music studio. What a first seems like a joyful event for Val soon becomes layered in anxiety and a disconnect from her body that is facilitated partly by Raúl and her gynaecologist who stops treating Val as a person and instead as a vessel.
Val’s family with the exception of her “spinster” Aunt Isabel (Mercedes Hernández) treat her with varying forms of contempt. Whether it be the outright dislike shown by her sister Vero (Sonia Couoh) or her mother’s teasing about how Val isn’t good with children. Only Isabel believes Val when she starts to be stalked by an unnamed creature who seemingly wishes to harm the already nervous, anaemic, and sleep deprived “mother to be.”
Whether Val is hallucinating the creature who seems to be formed as female who shows her visions of twisted bodies and bones cracking through skin is less important than what it is slowly revealing about her psyche. She’s not just afraid of losing her identity while being pregnant, she’s afraid that her identity is already fractured. Raúl’s impatience with her and her own burgeoning sense that something is deeply awry in her life leads her to reconnect with her lover from her teenage year, Octavia (Mayra Batalla). Octavia provides a brief sanctuary where Val can remember who she once was – a wild child who lived on the fringes of society in queer and punk culture, dreamt of escaping to the hills, and yelled “I don’t like domestication!” when running to the police.
The tension between what motherhood means in society, or what it is supposed to mean (“It’s all worth it,” her mother-in-law tells her, even the feeling of being cracked open during childbirth) and what is natural and normal is explored with allegory and metaphor. Val is not a natural mother; even after the birth of her daughter she shows disinterest which can be read as postpartum depression but is more connected to her realising she is not where she should be. The bone breaking presence has not left her and she fears that the monstrousness is inside her.
In Mexican folklore: La Huesera is a woman who collects bones, specifically wolf bones, to create a creature generally a woman who is released into the wild. Vera eventually undergoes a dark magic ritual with ‘The Sabine Women’ to cleanse herself and save her daughter. The hallucinogenic ballet Cerveva creates is astonishing to witness.
Michelle Garza Cervera and Abia Castillo who wrote the script together are working in the well-established space that pregnancy and (m)otherhood can be the greatest horror some women face. What makes Huesera: The Bone Woman uniquely effective is that no line is superfluous, no image unnecessary. The horror that Val endures is partly rooted in the mundanity of feeling trapped (in a devouring web) in the domestic space she has quite literally crafted and the supernatural which offers more of a warning than a threat.
Watching Vera break down is distressing as she cracks and twists her own body, but the true horror exists in the cage she has built for herself in order to please her family and fit in to strictures that she never truly wanted. Her sister screams at her “People like you shouldn’t be allowed around children,” and “Just wait until Raúl discovers what a phoney you are.” The tether that has been holding Val hostage to social normalcy could snap at any second.
Ultimately, Cervera is operating in a symbolic world that reveals the real anxieties some women face. What if they don’t feel connected to the “life” growing inside them, what if they don’t see a child as their purpose? Huesera: The Bone Woman might wear the skin of a horror film (and the horror sequences are extremely well rendered) but it is the subtle dehumanisation of Val as ‘body with child’ that is more frightening. An intense and necessary entry into the canon of pregnancy horror, and one that acknowledges that rewilding is something some women require to fully embrace themselves.
