[Tribeca Review] Huesera
Pregnancy: a time to rejoice in the bringing of new life, forming within you. Everyone will say that you have the “glow”. Family and friends will congratulate you, adulation is in abundance, and strangers will smile at your growing belly. Advice will be thrust upon you—a lot of which you will not ask for—and all you can do is embrace the changes and the countless other moments to come. But what if these changes take a drastic toll on your psyche?
Director Michelle Garza Cervera’s debut feature film, Huesera, shows Valeria (Natalia Solián) is eager to start a family with her husband Raúl (Alfonso Dosal), even visiting a statue of the Virgin Mary to pray for her womb. The prayer works, finding that her doctor’s visit confirms that she is with child. Although elated, Valeria has a career she seems to enjoy as a carpenter but has to give up her in-home workshop for a nursery. With each passing week, she starts experiencing strange occurrences (she sees a woman commit suicide by jumping from her balcony to the street below, broken bones shown through skin but when she alerts her husband, he sees nothing and no one below). She also becomes less and less overjoyed to be pregnant, her health wanes as she doesn’t eat as much as she should and barely sleeps.
Not everyone is happy that Valeria is with child, her sister proclaiming that she never knew Valeria wanted children or even cared for kids, recounting a time when Valeria dropped a child down a flight of stairs; the child survived, but not without losing some brain function. When Valeria is asked to babysit her niece and nephew to dispel this notion, it goes awry as Valeria sees another person, the same eerie sound of the cracking of bones following not far behind. The children get hurt in the process of her dragging them to safety from something no one else can see or hear but her.
This becomes too much for Valeria, who has a noticeable anxious habit of cracking her knuckles—the sound is so disturbing that a few times she envisions her knuckles breaking, her foot getting broken, and other bones in her body being cracked. Under stress and seemingly growing more unhappy with each passing day, she decides to visit her old flame, Octavia (Mayra Batalla) a few times, and we see why Valeria is having such a hard time embracing her pregnancy. Or her new life altogether.
We get a flashback of Valeria as a young woman who is sure she will never conform to heteronormativity, even shouting into the night “I don’t like domestication!” but has found herself doing exactly that. Once she does have the baby, she can’t cope. You can see that it is painful for her as she’s unable to connect with the baby. A moment in the film, you believe she may even have caused harm to the infant, but we see she didn’t. She realizes she needs more than a doctor to help her with what she is going through. A ritual is performed, her aunt warning her that it can be dangerous, but it is encouraged. Valeria goes through with it for the sake of her child and her mental health, coming out the other side realizing what she must do. By the end of the film, you are left with a deep sadness for Valeria but also some sense of relief as well.
Showcased at Tribeca Film Festival, Huesera captured the other side of pregnancy that a lot of women go through, but are afraid to speak about because it goes against the norm. The other side is mournful, your old life is no more, and you don’t feel like you’ve gained but lost instead. It’s an incredibly poignant film that uses body horror to represent how pregnancy can change your body in many unexpected ways that some women can’t cope with. It also puts a mirror to mental health in pregnancy and how traumatic if can be, leaving the mother with PPD and/or PSTD, which can have dangerous side effects for the mother. This film resonated with me. Before and after having a new baby, the mind and emotions went to dark places, but not against the child, it was against the self. For Valeria, she was finally able to face the truth of it and leave her baby with her husband, leaving the life she thought she wanted but was only forcing herself into to her own detriment.
XYZ Film’s Huesera is not yet available for streaming, but was featured at Tribeca Festival. Stay tuned for where to stream this amazing film.
