A CHILD OF MY OWN- Review by April Neale
There are true crime documentaries that ask who did it? Others ask why? Maite Alberdi’s unsettling A Child of My Own asks something far more intriguing, especially for female viewers: What kind of society creates the conditions where a lie becomes easier to live than the truth?
The Chilean filmmaker, whose exquisite documentaries The Mole Agent and The Eternal Memory demonstrated extraordinary empathy without sacrificing journalistic rigor, turns her lens toward a recent and disturbing child abduction case in Mexico. Yet this is not another sensationalized Netflix true crime binge. It is a nuanced examination, laced with humorous moments, of identity, womanhood, fertility, shame, and cultural expectation.
Alberdi begins by allowing convicted kidnapper Alejandra Marín Mendoza to tell her own story, dramatized in the heightened style of a Mexican telenovela. It is funny, tragic, and absurd. We laugh as Alejandra engages in caloric orgiastic eating with sugary treats, French fries, and pastries to mimic pregnancy weight, stages ultrasounds, and rehearses motherhood. Then, almost imperceptibly, the laughter ends. Because she isn’t performing for us, but she is performing for herself. She has created an alt reality in real time, convincing all that she is carrying her husband’s baby after several miscarriages.
The film’s devastating insight comes from Alberdi’s realization that Alejandra didn’t simply deceive everyone around her. After the miscarriages and relentless expectations from her husband, mother-in-law, extended family, and community, she appears to have constructed an elaborate lie involving a complicit baby donor, as she desperately needed to believe in herself. Then Alberdi deftly weaves into the story for the audience and herself, weaving transcripts that dismantle Alejandra’s carefully crafted false narrative.
The supposed agreement with the baby’s biological mother never existed. The woman was not surrendering her child. She was the victim of a calculated kidnapping from a maternity ward. Alberdi pivots, refusing to become an accomplice to deception while also refusing to flatten Alejandra into a monster. We see how Alejandra’s culture is one where being a mother is the pinnacle of everything. No talk anywhere of what she wants to do with her life, other than deliver her husband loads of children.
That balance is what elevates A Child of My Own above conventional true crime. As women watching, we’re almost forced to stop and interrogate our own assumptions. The questions linger long after the credits. Why has motherhood become the defining measure of womanhood in so many cultures? Why are women who cannot conceive treated as though they have somehow failed? Why do entire families, communities, and even strangers feel entitled to weigh in on a woman’s reproductive life?
But the documentary also quietly turns the mirror toward North America. We often congratulate ourselves for having escaped those pressures. Have we? Or have we simply replaced one impossible expectation with another? These thoughts will come to you as you watch this hybridized documentary by a skillful storyteller.
In much of the United States and Canada, young women are encouraged to pursue education, careers, financial independence, and personal fulfillment before motherhood. Those aspirations have rightly expanded opportunities for generations of women. It is factual that our fertility as a society has plummeted because of delayed childbirth. Yet that cultural shift can create its own hierarchy of judgment. Young motherhood where we live is frequently portrayed as a mistake, an interruption, or a failure to achieve one’s potential.
One culture asks, Why aren’t you a mother yet? The other often asks, Why did you become one so soon? Neither question belongs to anyone except the woman herself.
Alberdi never argues that social pressure excuses criminal behavior. It does not. Mayra, whose newborn daughter was abducted, remains the documentary’s moral center. Her trauma is immeasurable, and the film gives it the dignity and gravity it deserves. Alberdi asks us to consider whether impossible expectations can distort identity itself. When every woman’s worth is tied to motherhood, what happens when biology refuses to cooperate? When do family expectations become suffocating? When is grief hidden because disappointment would be unbearable?
Those questions extend beyond Mexico. Different pressures.The same judgment. Infertility remains one of the last deeply private griefs women are expected to endure while smiling through baby showers, pregnancy announcements, and intrusive questions about when they’ll “finally” have children. Simultaneously, younger mothers in Western cultures often confront assumptions that they lacked ambition or made poor choices.
What makes A Child of My Own so extraordinary is Alberdi’s refusal to offer comforting conclusions. She trusts audiences with complexity. She demonstrates that understanding the forces shaping a person’s choices is not the same as forgiving those choices. That distinction has become increasingly rare.
You’ll arrive expecting true crime. You’ll leave questioning the stories every culture tells women about who they’re supposed to become.
Bottom line: Visually inventive, emotionally layered, and ethically rigorous, A Child of My Own blends the emotional excess of a telenovela with the investigative discipline of documentary filmmaking. The result is one of the year’s most thought-provoking nonfiction films.
