There are some nasty scares in this chiller from Mexican film-maker Michelle Garza Cervera who is making her feature debut: a horror film that doubles as a parable of post-partum depression, something with the creeping anxiety of Polanski’s Repulsion or Rosemary’s Baby.
Valeria (Natalia Solián) is a young woman who is longing to have a baby with her supportive partner Raúl (Alfonso Dosal) and when Valeria gets pregnant, she couldn’t be happier, or so she thinks. Her sister – married, with children in which Valeria has never taken much interest – is openly contemptuous of her conversion to the motherhood ideal, and her parents are themselves politely sceptical. A chance meaning brings Valeria into contact with an old lover, Octavia (Mayra Batalla), and Valeria is plagued with memories of the exciting, bohemian life she abandoned for the hetero-normal lifestyle; at the same time she experiences disturbing glimpses of strangers whose bodies jerk, convulse and click with a bone-breaking sound.
To her family’s baffled dismay, Valeria becomes neurotically addicted to cracking her knuckles as the date of delivery approaches. Her whole being, her whole sense of herself, is cracking up, and she is warned that childbirth itself will feel like every bone in her body is breaking. Tellingly, the only person in whom Valeria can confide is her aunt: a gay woman. But when the baby is born, in place of the catharsis she might have hoped for, something terrible happens.
Perhaps this movie is a little anticlimactic, but there is often an atmosphere of real fear, especially when Natalia is driven to the edge by her newborn’s incessant crying: a horrible moment which is not supernatural in the slightest.
• Huesera: The Bone Woman is released on 12 May on Shudder and AMC+.
