When I first watched the end of Huesera: The Bone Woman through tears, I knew that I had to talk about the film with my therapist. Michelle Garza Cervera’s 2022 feature directorial debut follows Valeria (Natalia Solián), a woman who is navigating pregnancy and coming to terms with identity and motherhood as an entity, La Huesera, haunts her. The film is a beautiful examination of societal expectations of women and how queer women are often at odds with these expectations in a patriarchal world.

The film opens with a woman crawling on her knees up stone steps. We see many women making a pilgrimage to the looming maternal statue depicting la Guadalupe and the baby Jesus. Valeria makes an offering of flowers, and receives a blessing over her womb. A group sings praises to la Guadalupe, but the song is undercut with an ominous undertone before the image is overlaid by a figure on fire. From the outset, motherhood is paired with pain, sacrifice, and discomfort.

Throughout the film we see many examples of Valeria shrinking herself to fit others’ expectations of motherhood, and by extension, expectations of femininity. When she tries to silently cope with the stress of her family’s expectations, she cracks her knuckles absentmindedly. The sound design is impeccable in these moments, delivering the crackling directly to our eardrums, amplifying what Valeria is doing to herself in order to keep herself from acting out and saying what she really feels and wants to others around her in favor of keeping the peace.

Valeria’s attempts at making herself smaller for the sake of conformity are some of the most poignant bits of horror in Huesera. It is clear that she is passionate about her carpentry and art, but she’s encouraged by everyone around her to drop these facets of her identity for the sake of the baby. Her gynecologist tells her to stop her craft due to the possible risk of chemicals involved affecting the baby. She has to give up her workshop in order to make a nursery. We see relics of her former life: a bass guitar, books about Chicana punk history, punk CDs, a print of Eric Drooker’s “Crucifixion” which depicts a nude female figure who is crucified on a uterus; all of these items have been packed away in a closet, pieces of herself that Valeria has already closed off for the sake of creating a heteronormative life with her husband, Raul (Alfonso Dosal). Later in the film, she even throws these items away when she tries to recommit to the heteronormative ideal. Heteronormative patriarchal society ties the value of women to producing children and adhering to strict expectations to put others ahead of them, even to their own detriment.

Valeria makes a crib, a mobile, a rocking chair, and crochets a blanket for the baby. Part of these attempts to fold herself into her experience of motherhood are undone after a stressful dinner party when the crib she made is set on fire. Through Valeria’s point of view, we see the strange entity that has been haunting her in the room just prior to the fire. However, Valeria was secretly smoking in that scene, so even to the audience it is ambiguous as to whether she set the fire herself. In either interpretation, the end result is the same: her attempts to tie herself to her experience of motherhood and her child are severed.

This stripping of Valeria’s identity as an individual at the hands of the patriarchal view of motherhood is even present in depictions of sexual intimacy. At the beginning of the film when Valeria and Raul are having sex, Valeria appears clearly distracted, still half-clothed and passively lying on her back. She encourages him to hurry up and finish orgasm. He jokingly asks her if she also was able to come, and she says yes. They both laugh, knowing that she did not. Later in the film, when she is visibly pregnant, she attempts to initiate sex with Raul, which he declines.

Obviously a partner is always well within their right to decline sex, but his reasoning for doing so is because he’s concerned about harming the fetus. Current medical advice states that in most cases where other risk factors are not present, pregnant people are able to have sex if they choose to do so. Despite this understanding in the scientific community, Raul’s reaction exemplifies the shift in how pregnant people are regarded: they are no longer their own individual with wants and needs, they become seen as incubators whose merit is based on the contents of their uterus. There could be cultural space for a pregnant person’s experience to be a celebration of bringing forth new life, but too often in practice, the focus is on the pregnant person’s sacrifice rather than their wellbeing. Pregnant people are expected to have their identities fade away and for their new priority to be wholly centered on the baby.

We can contrast Valeria’s sexual experiences with Raul with her scenes with Octavia (Mayra Batalla). We learn in flashbacks that Octavia and Valeria were girlfriends as teenagers. In the present, it is clear that there is distance and tension between them when Raul is around. Valeria seeks Octavia’s company after being rejected by Raul. Octavia tells Valeria that she can find a way to continue her trade even with a baby. She’s the first person in the film to encourage Valeria to make motherhood work with her personality and interests, rather than expecting her to give them up in service of motherhood. They kiss and hold one another extremely passionately. Yes, Valeria is pregnant, but Octavia still sees Valeria as a whole person with wants and needs of her own in addition to the pregnancy. Valeria finds more than physical intimacy with Octavia; she is free to openly be her queer self and is embraced lovingly as a whole. Unfortunately, Valeria is torn between this freedom and fitting into heteronormative expectations, and her ambivalence causes harm to Raul, Octavia, and even to herself.

Despite her attempts at fitting into the mold, she is repeatedly subjected to the doubts of others around her. Her family alludes to an incident in which she was babysitting and a child was harmed. It’s ambiguous as to whether the child was harmed as an accident, due to neglect, or intentionally, but it seems that everyone has doubts as to whether a child would be safe in Valeria’s care. At the start of the film, children are often framed in grotesque or unsettling ways. The child making a gaunt face at Valeria in the waiting room at the doctor clearly makes Valeria uncomfortable. At her parents’ place, her niece and nephew are uncomfortable around her, and her nephew disgustingly shows off a mouth full of food. No doubt their behavior is reinforced by her sister’s attitude toward Valeria. In one instance we see her overhear the cry of an infant, and she cracks her knuckles, clearly uncomfortable in hearing the noise.

In this film, pregnancy, childbirth, and the realities of having a newborn baby are depicted bluntly and often with a cold distance. Valeria has little to no excitement during the ultrasound appointment where they learn the child’s sex, something she recognizes as unusual, but to protect Raul’s excitement and follow the social script that is expected of her, she swallows the discomfort. She goes into labor during a rock show where she was trying to visit Octavia. The baby comes, and most of the medical team leaves with the baby. Only one nurse stays behind to show Valeria the needle she will have to use to suture, implying either tearing during birth, the inclusion of a “husband stitch” (an unethical extra few stitches to make the vaginal opening tighter for the sake of the husband’s sexual pleasure), or both. There is no comfort or attending to Valeria once the baby is born. Later in her hospital room, Valeria avoids holding the baby, turning away from Raul and their child in her hospital bed with no trace of happiness on her face. She’s following the social script, and it saps her of energy and joy as time goes on.

Later at home, Valeria is visibly reluctant to take the baby when it is hungry, and the next shot we see is her icing her nipple after breastfeeding. She looks at her crying baby in the crib with exhaustion and frustration and retreats to her own bed in tears. When the crying does not stop for hours, her body contorts on the bed in the same way that we’ve seen in the entity who haunts her. The birth of the baby hasn’t brought any relief to the ordeal of pregnancy; it has simply started a new chapter of pain and exhaustion. What follows is a horrifying scene in which we are unable to see what happens to the baby, we just know that it is silent and Valeria goes to sleep.

In the morning, she wakes up and realizes she doesn’t hear or see the baby on the monitor. She doesn’t know where the baby is at all. It’s ambiguous as to whether she was possessed by the entity the night before or she is experiencing a form of postpartum depression or psychosis. We’re treated to a scene full of tension and fear with Valeria as she searches for the baby. The tension breaks as Valeria recognizes muffled cries coming from the fridge. Miraculously, the baby did not suffocate or freeze, and Valeria recognizes that she has no choice but to go through with the “dark rituals” alluded to her by a curandera, Ursula (Martha Claudia Moreno), and Valeria’s aunt, Isabel (Mercedes Hernández) earlier in the film.

The rituals are not explained to us, we only see the Sabine women praying over Valeria and guiding her through some motions. We stay with Valeria’s point of view for her experience as she navigates her internal journey to combat her demons. She encounters multiple Huesera figures, seeing clearly the entities that have tormented her: faceless women, moving and cracking their bones, shambling forward toward her. Valeria’s own bones crack and she's overtaken and is left a crumpled mess on the forest floor. As she releases the baby blanket, she sees herself looking back at her from underneath it. Valeria watches that form of her erupt into flames, the image we saw at the start of the film. She awakens the next morning to the Sabine women watching over her, greeting her warmly. She looks upon her baby and chokes back tears, now with recognition and understanding. She has learned that for her to be a mother is to break herself to fit a mold that was never hers. The haunting was Valeria crushing herself rather than the fault of an external force following her or wishing her ill. She was the one bringing herself this harm, and it was up to her to choose to stop it.

In folklore, La Huesera is a witch who collects bones and breathes new life into them. They sometimes take the shape of a woman who is wild and cannot be tamed. Some who align with patriarchal beliefs may interpret the folklore figure as someone who creates women who are “problems,” but the message in the film is clear: women who don’t conform are necessary, beautiful, and worthy of existence and love. Motherhood and being a loving wife, while they can be fulfilling experiences for some, are not the only ways that women, Mexican women in particular, can flourish. As Valeria goes through her hallucinogenic exorcism in the climax of the film, it becomes clear that Huesera is not one to be feared. The bones cracking and constraining Valeria are of her own creation. By leaning into the cultural expectations reinforced by her family and others around her, Valeria was harming herself, shrinking her own identity to try to fit into a box that was never made for her.

From the very beginning of this film, I was in step with Valeria at every turn. As an asexual aromantic Latina, I saw my younger self in her choices to cut pieces of herself off to satisfy expectations placed on her by others. I am lucky to have parents who have supported my stated desire to never get married or have children. However, I have extended family who share views with Valeria’s family and have heard the same messaging from them and other people in the world. As someone who didn’t even know that asexuality was a possibility when I was younger, I am all too familiar with the experience of compulsory heterosexuality, though I didn’t know that’s what I was doing at the time. Similar to Valeria, I would date men because I “knew” that this was an expected life milestone, to find a partner and be with them. I “knew” that someday I would probably try to have children because that’s what we do, right?

Two to three weeks before I watched Huesera, I had been talking to my therapist about a horrible relationship I was in during my late teens and early 20s. I was processing the fact that I could have ended up married and pregnant with a man who demeaned me and worked to diminish the light within me. There are times that I look back on that relationship and am thankful that I was eventually able to walk away and start finding myself later in adulthood. It was hard to do that then, even without marriage and children. So at the end of the film, when Valeria walks away from Raul and the baby, I understood her completely. I understood how hard that must have been for her to finally make that decision and take steps to no longer cram herself into a too-tight space.

For days after I watched the movie, even just thinking about the ending made me cry. I summarized the key points of the film to my therapist through sobs. Even now, working on this essay, I find it difficult to stop the tears from coming. When I watched Valeria grab her suitcase and close the door behind her, I saw myself a little over a decade ago finally choosing myself. The weight of my choices never felt so big and so real until I saw them reflected back to me through Valeria’s journey. I rarely feel so connected to and represented by a movie on these topics, and for that reason I am grateful for its existence. I can only hope that others have had the opportunity to feel the same way and are empowered to live authentically.