Nights of Horror: Huesera: The Bone Woman (2022)

Huesera: The Bone Woman (Mexico/Peru, 2022)

90 km southwest of Mexico City, near the town of El Ahuehuete, stands what I’m pretty sure is the largest statue of La Virgen de Guadalupe in the world. It’s got to be. It’s 33 meters tall, 11 meters wide, and 110 tons. To make the pilgrimage, one must ascend about 1400 steps. The devotees in the opening of Huesera do this on their knees, because if you really want to go pray to La Virgen for… whatever you’re begging for, or thanking for, etc., you’ve got to do it right. Show your supplication. It is at the apex of this incredible monument where we meet our protagonist, Valeria, who wants more than anything to have a baby.

Or does she?

Valeria (Natalia Solián) seems to be a happy woman, excitedly trying to get pregnant with her husband, Raul. She works as a carpenter, crafting chairs in her workshop by hand, while he works as a musician with a soundproof studio in their upper middle class home.

It seems the prayers (along with rolling around on her back with a fresh load inside) work for Valeria, who begins to experience the symptoms of a difficult pregnancy almost immediately. She sees spiders everywhere, witnesses a faceless woman commit suicide by jumping out of a high window and then watches said woman’s shattered body wake up and skitter away, her bones crunching and snapping to the sound of distant thunder. She becomes convinced, and we do along with her, that someone is trying to break into the house. She sees random faceless and broken bodies contorting around corners, writhing in alleys.

A Mother’s Day dinner proves alienating, as no one in her family is supportive of the bun in her oven, least of all, her sister, who we might as well call Bebe on account of her bad-ass kids. Seriously, someone get Mary Poppins in here. Or Krampus. Or Major Payne. Fuck those kids. So it’s ridiculous that all of Valeria’s family look at her as if to ask “Really? YOU?”

These hypocrites even bust her chops at the table, saying she’s a terrible babysitter (I mean honestly, who hasn’t dropped a baby?), and how she would make a terrible parent, which is exactly what she needs to hear. There is the small relief that, at least, Valeria didn’t end up like her unmarried and childless aunt over there, who can hear you, she’s right there.

It’s good that she can turn to her cool lesbian Tía Chavela, who, if she isn’t named after ranchera superstar and lesbian icon Chavela Vargas, it’s a damn fine coincidence. But I doubt anything in this film is coincidental. It isn’t lost on me that every time any of the extended family (including Raul’s) demonstrate any microaggressions, Valeria’s bones make more noise than usual. We can hear her spine scraping against itself, as well as her knuckles popping, which is more a compulsive behavior she does throughout the film the more stressed out she gets, but fuck, is it effective. About as effective as it is when cool lesbian Tía Chavela places her own hands on Valeria’s, calming her down in the way her own mother should if only she didn’t have her head up her ass.

Tía Chavela is singled out as the black sheep of the family on account of her lesbianism, which makes sense for Mexico, but she is literally the coolest character here besides Valeria. She runs a little mercado with a nail salon in the back and there’s a bunch of cool older punk looking brujas, and they’re drinking big ass micheladas and laughing and smoking cigars and doing tarot, telling Valeria in an ovomancy reading: “You’ve got the Spider. She is a mother, but also a predator.” They also point out that a spider’s web is a home, but also a prison.

This scene, in which our girl is safely surrounded by amazing accepting women who are all living their best wild lives exists in the starkest possible contrast to Raul’s stuffy rich mom getting snippy because Valeria wants to make her own crib instead of buying one. Bro I cannot stress this enough, she’s literally a carpenter.

For how long, though? Cause the (male) doctor says (and Raul agrees) that she needs to give up woodworking (on account of the chemicals) to ensure a healthy pregnancy. She’s losing weight instead of gaining it, and of course… the hallucinations. “Adios, taller,” Raul says, as if he doesn’t have a soundproof studio they could turn into a fucking nursery. It’s upsetting. I like Raul less every time I see him. And I wanted to like him. He’s a musician. He’s a provider, with a tight family. He cares for Valeria. Doesn’t he? Isn’t this what we’re supposed to want? Is the life she’s woven around herself… it’s what she wanted. Of course it is. She wants to want it.

Doesn’t she?

As Valeria dismantles her workshop and turns it into a nursery, she goes about putting things into storage. At one point we see in the closet her old bass and amp, and a big box labeled “punk stuff,” which contains a lot of photos, a Cure t-shirt, and several books, including The Spitboy Rule: Tales of a Xicana in a Female Punk Band, by Michelle Cruz Gonzales. Now the fantastic soundtrack makes sense. We see Valeria in flashback, with a shaved head, running with her punk-ass friends, making out with her girlfriend Octavia, yelling “I don’t like domestication!” Again, in stark contrast to her now, sitting on the floor next to a crib, putting all her tools and memories into a box, putting up pleasant yellow wallpaper (!!!!!!!!!), completely domesticated. So domesticated that her husband won’t even fuck her. Cause it’s “creepy to have sex with the baby right there.”

This baby is cramping her style, is what I’m saying. It’s bad enough that during pregnancy your body becomes repulsive to yourself, but to be rejected by your partner adds further alienation and humiliation. I don’t know, as a woman who has been pregnant before, it read to me as him being disgusted by her and I talked to a guy friend who said that Raul needed to “just get over it” and I was like “Get over what, her changing body? Rude.” But you know who delights in Valeria’s pregnant body? Octavia. That’s right, they’ve reconnected, and she’s still mad, but honestly nothing feels more right than when these two are together in the same room.

I’m not even getting to the scary parts! I mean, it’s pretty scary realizing that you don’t want what you thought you wanted, and sometimes it means killing parts of yourself to create the separation between who you are and the version of yourself you thought would fit better into the world you’re in. And maybe you’re not meant for this world. But this cerebral interpretation doesn’t include horrifying spider monsters so I would advise you to just watch the movie and drink a michelada.

This movie is more than a body horror masterpiece about a woman realizing she’s lost all of her personal agency in the wake of a difficult pregnancy. It’s also a queer masterpiece about a queer woman reclaiming her life after a heteronormative narrative is forced on her by way of guilt. It’s deeply upsetting in several points (avoid if you don’t like spiders), thanks in no small part to the inventive framing (I’m looking at you, broken bone spider woman crawling in the background, yeah I fuckin see you) and the incredible work done by the sound team. The heartbeats, the bones cracking, good god the bones cracking, to every bit of whistling wind, swallowed spit, dragging fabric. Even the dead space and the horrifying not a rat king (but kind of a rat king) in the climax is a cornucopia of sound, because the textured sound of wet skin covered in dirt slapping against wet skin covered in dirt can be fucking terrifying. The sound in this movie needs awards.

To Michele Garza Cervera on her first feature: Five stars. No notes.  Time for me to go listen to a bunch of Décima Víctima and Leonora Post-Punk, I’ll be in this mood for the rest of the day.

Available on Shudder.