CIFF 2022 | ‘Huesera’ review: Motherhood has never been more nightmarish

As thoughtful and intricate as it is visceral, Michelle Garza Cervera’s debut horror feature makes a scream queen out of rising star Natalia Solián.

Natalia Solián in “Huesera.” Photo courtesy of Disruptiva Films.

To the audience’s pleasant surprise, the first showing of Michelle Garza Cervera’s debut feature at the Chicago International Film Festival begins with a video message from the director herself. It is a lovely gesture, one that no other absent talent has thought to repeat since last year (when “The French Dispatch” opened with a video message from Bill Murray on a farm full of donkeys). Lamenting that work has kept her from attending the festival alongside us, the young director comes across as earnest and thoughtful. Upon reflection, those qualities are also incredibly fitting descriptors for “Huesera,” a much-needed refresher for horror films amidst a landscape oversaturated by insipid Blumhouse franchise attempts.

Valeria (played brilliantly by Natalia Solián) is a young mother-to-be who seemingly has it all — a beautiful home, devoted parents and in-laws, and a loving relationship with her partner Raúl (Alfonso Dosal). But as her pregnancy progresses, ominous visions of death and dismemberment plague her constantly, and her composure rapidly begins to unravel. Turning to her ex-girlfriend Octavia (Mayra Batalla) and her aunt Isabel (Mercedes Hernández) for solace, Valeria is soon led down the murky path of occult dabbling and witchcraft exorcism rituals, as it becomes clear that motherhood might soon prove to be the death of her.

Part body horror feature and part psychological thriller, “Huesera” isn’t afraid to get visceral with its scares. Viewers will never hear the cracking of knuckles quite so benignly again after seeing “Huesera,” as the film’s sophisticated sound design effectively turns the tiniest shifting of bones and joints into hair-raising agents of tension. Such is befitting of the film’s title, which is derived from the Mexican legend of La Huesera (“The Weaver” or “The Bone Woman”), a necromantic female entity that summons skeletons to life. But there is no central “big bad;” no demonic villain to be found besides what lurks in the depths of Valeria’s, and our own, minds.

Here, Garza Cervera cleverly breathes new life into La Huesera, transforming her from a simplistic, spectral boogeyman into the concept of a pervasive, oppressive existential threat. Society forces everyone to fit into boxes — to go to university, find a stable job, get married, have kids, and chase a white-picket-fence life. But fitting into those boxes often requires impossible sacrifices from women and queer people, who stand to lose livelihoods, careers, and in some cases, their entire identities, to oppressive standards exerted by heteronormativity and patriarchally-enforced gender roles. Valeria gives up her woodworking career, her bodily autonomy, her sexuality, and even her sanity, to play at having the “perfect” life — an act of contortion that is mirrored in the cracking bones and twisting muscles of the entity she sees herself slowly transforming into. At the risk of sounding like The Joker, there’s no mistaking that society is the real villain here, remorselessly exacting its outdated standards on all to oft-devastating consequences.

The thoughtfulness that Garza Cervera has put into “Huesera” is evident in her painstaking subversion of just about every symbol of motherhood known to man (and woman), from imagery of the Virgin Mary to the pervasive spiral leitmotif we see everywhere — a halo? Or a spider’s trap? Yet at times, despite all its feminist posturing, “Huesera” treads dangerously close to an unnecessarily binary view of motherhood as imprisonment and singlehood (or queerness) as freedom, which threatens to set back the otherwise progressive discourse that the film engages in. Is it too much to expect a 93-minute horror movie to deliver both scares and a nuanced study of self-fulfilment during motherhood? Perhaps. Does the lack of such a study compromise the otherwise sturdy, scare-filled footing that “Huesera” builds for itself? Certainly not. Bone-chilling  and brash, “Huesera” establishes both Garza Cervera and her star Natalia Solián as rising new talents on the international horror stage. Feminist folk horror has never looked so fresh.