“Huesera: The Bone Woman” is a creepy supernatural horror film about a young pregnant woman under one sinister influence. Quite reminiscent of a number of recent female body horror films associated with pregnancy, the movie distinguishes itself via its distinctive mood and details to observe, and it becomes more interesting as delving more into its heroine’s increasingly conflicted state of mind later in the story.

At the beginning, we see how everything looks happy and fine for Valeria Hernandez (Natalia Solián) and her husband Raúl (Alfonso Dosal). Living fairly well together in their nice residence incidentally owned by her husband’s affluent mother, they have been trying hard for having a baby as shown from their first scene in the movie, and Valeria soon comes to bring her husband the good news they have eagerly waited for.

However, as she and her husband prepare for the birth of their baby, Valeria cannot help but sense something odd around her. At first, it was just a minor hallucination, but then she finds herself gradually disturbed by one strange happening after another. To her husband, she is simply having a sort of anxiety problem associated with her first pregnancy experience, but those weird happenings of hers feel so real to her nonetheless.

And her family do not help her that much. While her husband’s mother is delighted by her daughter-in-law’s pregnancy, she sometimes annoys Valeria, and so do Valeria’s parents and older sister, who reminds her of an unfortunate old incident in the past. At least, her spinster aunt shows some care and understanding, and Valeria later comes to one of her aunt’s old friends for getting some help on handling whatever is happening to her.

Thanks to that friend of her aunt, everything seems to become all right again for Valeria for a while, but, of course, she soon finds herself terrorized more and more by that sinister entity she felt from the very beginning. As she is thrown into more anxiety and dread, her relationship with her husband gets more deteriorated, and then there comes a point where the situation becomes quite serious for both of them.

Around this point, the screenplay by director Michelle Garza Cervera and her co-writer Abia Castillo reveals a bit about its heroine via a flashback scene. As implied by the contents of a box hidden in the closet of the baby room, there was a time when Valeria was young and wild, but she later decided to become an exemplary daughter for her parents just because of a tragic incident in the family, and this disappoints her best friend Octavia (Mayra Batalla) a lot, who wanted to get away from their neighborhood along with her someday.

When she came across Octavia early in the story, Octavia felt to her like a mere figure from the past, but Valeria comes to lean more on her former lover, and this consequently puts more conflict on Valeria. So far, she has been doing what she is expected to do as a good daughter, wife, and mother, but she cannot help but think more about her wild moments of freedom in the past, and this eventually culminates into an unexpected dramatic moment unfolded in the middle of a loud and crowded punk rock performance.

Still remaining troubled and conflicted as before, Valeria gets cornered more by that sinister entity, and we get one truly frightening moment when she finds herself driven to do something quite terrible. She comes to realize that she really needs a certain measure suggested by her aunt’s friend, but, as her aunt’s friend warned to her in advance, this can be quite risky for her for good reasons.

What follows next is a series of spooky moments experienced by our heroine as she goes through an old ritual executed by her aunt’s friend and several other old ladies. This may look a bit silly at first, but we are gradually captivated by the utterly serious mood surrounding them, and then we are caught off guard by when our heroine is suddenly thrown into what can be regarded as a realm of spirits. What happens to her next is alternatively frightening and baffling to say the least, and then the movie delivers a truly scary climax reminding us more of its very title, which reflects more than that disturbing habit of our heroine.

The performances of the main cast members are effective on the whole. As the center of the story, Natalia Solián is believable in her character’s gradual mental implosion along the narrative, and her solid performance is the main reason why we do not need much explanation on her character’s eventual decision right after that climactic part. In case of several supporting performers surrounding Solián, Alfonso Dosal, Mercedes Hernández, Martha Claudia Moreno, and Mayra Batalla are well-cast in their respective parts, and Batalla is particularly good during her several scenes with Solián.

Overall, “Huesera: The Bone Woman” is a competent genre piece to be admired by mood, storytelling, and performance. Although this is her first feature film, Garza Cervera, who won the Best New Narrative Director and Nora Ephron awards when it was shown at the Tribeca Festival in 2022, demonstrates a considerable amount of skill and confidence here, and it will be interesting to see what may come next from her next.