Val’s a rebel, you see, with an anti-authoritarian punk rock past and an ex-girlfriend named Octavia ( Mayra Batalla) who provides a tempting alternative to Val’s domesticated new life. But when she and her bourgeois husband Raúl ( Alfonso Dosal) succeed in getting pregnant, Val starts to bristle at the paternalism with which her husband, her family, and her doctor treat her now that she’s got a fetus (she won’t call it a baby until it’s born) inside of her. At the beginning of the film, Val wants a child more than anything in the world-so much so that she’s willing to give up her career as a furniture maker in order to realize this dream. The score and sound design stand out for their prickly, needling ability to spike a viewer’s cortisol levels on demand, making the Spanish-language punk tracks that dot the film seem soothing by comparison.īut the most engaging element is Cervera and her co-writers’ characterization of Val, a woman caught between what she really wants, what she thinks she should want, and what society wants for her. There isn’t a single throwaway shot in this film: Even establishing shots and dialogue scenes are artfully composed and beautifully lit. Aesthetically, Cervera has a particularly strong grasp on millennial color palettes, which present themselves in eye-soothing combinations of pink and green. But it does present them in a vessel that’s so artfully crafted, and filled with details that bring the characters and their relationships to such vivid life, that it accomplishes a lofty goal for genre cinema: Taking a familiar formula and turning it into a personal statement. “Huesera” doesn’t necessarily re-invent either of those subgenres. “Huesera” falls into the subcategory of pregnancy-as-body-horror, combined with a haunted-house element that sees Val plagued by a demonic spirit that announces its presence with the cracking and snapping of bones.

The canon of horror films by women directors exploring ambivalence towards-or outright hostility to-what’s supposed to be a woman’s ultimate fulfillment and purpose in life has grown exponentially since “ The Babadook” premiered nearly a decade ago.

This acknowledgement of the dark side of motherhood is essential to director Michelle Garza Cervera’s debut feature, which won two major awards at the Tribeca Film Festival last summer.

What my bones know