The Mexican-Peruvian horror movie explores the horrors of pregnancy, motherhood, and conformity
Published : 19 Oct 2023, 07:31 PM
The following article contains mild spoilers for the 2022 Mexican-Peruvian horror movie 'Huesera: The Bone Woman'.
How often during a young woman's life are they expected to take care of their younger siblings or another child?
Look after them when parents are away? Put them to sleep while singing lullabies? Tend to them and cradle them when they cry? Feed them when they are hungry and gaping like newborn fragile birds with their pitiful doe eyes? Play the nursemaid?
During one such assignment, Valeria makes a mistake and a neighbour's child is dropped down the stairs. It is a moment that will weigh her down well into the future.
But, in the movie's main thread, she begins to bear another weight- a child. It is a child she has long yearned for, even pleaded to Mother Mary for with her mother at her side.
She is happy, of course. But then the doubts from that tragic moment in her past creep back in. In hushed tones, they whisper:
"Are you really worthy of being a mother?"
Meanwhile, her mother is thankful Valeria hasn't become a spinster like her aunt. Spinsterhood, after all, is the foulest fate that could befall a woman.
After tiptoeing up the hill of age and being haunted by the ticking clock of time, she has finally made it. She is married and bearing the child of her husband. She should be whole. A true woman. Complete.
Of course, she is happy.
After all, she wanted the child. She spent her days toiling on a beautiful crib with her skilled hands. But all those harsh chemicals and sharp tools threaten the child inside and the soft disposition appropriate for a mother. But that's the creed of motherhood. She has to put away her trade and passions, burn them down to ash, to welcome a child, a child that she and everyone else wanted so dearly.
At times, Valeria starts to feel discomfort. And fear.
She sees a woman no one else can. A monstrous spider grazes her workshop, invading her sanctuary.
Her husband dismisses these hauntings as nightmares. The question ripples through her, screaming through her thoughts - are these agonies real, or phantoms spawned by her own mind?
She seeks answers from a local practitioner of magic. She is delivered the image of a spider – an unsettling omen of motherhood and predation. Valeria feels the silky strands of the cobweb tighten. Ensnared in its grasp, her home turns from a safe haven to a confining pit devoid of solace and comfort.
Valeria must reshape her existence for the child—gain weight, change her meals and diet, swallow pills and tend to her needs, but only through the prism of the foetus's well-being. Her personhood is replaced by the role of a womb—a vessel in which life is woven - a walking, talking, breathing incubator.
Slowly, Valeria starts to feel that her life isn't even hers. She feels like a puppet, pulled hither-thither by her strings.
She looks at herself and sees someone she does not entirely recognise. A person whose free, rebellious disposition has been blunted by dogma. She remembers how she had never wanted to walk this path. Her 'normal' life is not one she had dreamt of.
She begins to wonder if her yearning for a child was a tapestry built from the words and glances laid upon her by everyone else.
But there are hints of another person inside. It is in the cracking of her knuckles, a habit she keeps despite her mother's warning about it making her a crooked woman.
Perhaps like the bone woman Valeria sees, the one who stalks her. waits for her, and always seems to be there. Is she looking to take her soul? Is it because Valeria is a failed mother? Is she trying to scare her into line with the other good mothers?
But who would believe a bone woman, a grotesque relic from the fables of the past? She doesn't exist. And what deviant woman doesn't want the heavenly blessing of bearing a child? Such a thing doesn't exist either. Both are fanciful monstrosities.
As Valeria's pregnancy escalates, her body twitches and cracks into a writhing mess of pain and nightmare. The choreography of age-old pains and scars flourish through her contorting body. Her swelling belly pulses out from the screen. And all we can do is watch.
This article is part of Stripe, bdnews24.com's special publication focusing on culture and society from a youth perspective.