Official selection
Tribeca Film Festival 2022
Honors
Best New Narrative Director, The Nora Ephron Award, Tribeca Film Festival 2022
Director
Michelle Garca Cervera
Producer
Edher Campos, Paulina Villavicencio
Writer
Abia Castillo, Michelle Garca Cervera
Cast
López Aída, Mayra Batalla, Alfonso Dosal, Mercedes Hernández, Natalia Solián
Cinematographer
Nur Rubio Sherwell
Composer
Gibrán Androide, Cabeza De Vaca
Editor
Adriana Martínez
contact
XYZ Films
“Oozing with omens and heavy with menace… The movie—like many great works of vision—is almost an exorcism itself”- Natalia Winkelman, NEW YORK TIMES
“A tense tale that uses horror to explore feelings that are very real and immensely hard to explore on film”– Jeff Ewing, FORBES
“A viscerally scary experience… already among my favorite horror movies of 2022”– Remy Millisky, NIGHTMARISH CONJURINGS
Valeria (Natalia Solián) is expecting her first child. It’s what she’s always wanted. At the least, it’s what others have always wanted for her. Her boyfriend, Raúl (Alfonso Dosal), couldn’t be happier. Her family is mostly thrilled. Tempered joy soon turns to something different. Skin-crawling visions jolt her sensibilities, a terrible presence permeating every molecule that she breathes. Valeria feels powerless as her body begins to twist. She comes to the terrible realization that she may be cursed by a supernatural entity, La Huesera (“Bone Woman”). As her pregnancy progresses and panic intensifies, her behaviour now scaring many around her, she reconnects with people from the life she gave up when she settled down. She sees her first love, Octavia (Mayra Batalla). She seeks the help of witches. Can Valeria save herself?
Three years after touching audiences with her short THE ORIGINAL, Michelle Garza Cervera is returning to Fantasia a hero with her instant classic of a first feature, fresh off its award-winning Tribeca launch. As important a breakout debut as Jennifer Kent’s THE BABADOOK, HUESERA belongs to a special tribe of heartfelt genre works that tear apart expectations of domesticity and motherhood on visceral horror-film terms. Steeped in a blend of Mexican folklore and Catholicism, imbued with a queasy sense of damnation that comes as much from self-compromising choices as from unnameable occult places, this is a scorching personal vision that asks complex questions with ferocious honesty. Alongside imagery that will stop your heart, Valeria’s spiralling anxieties hit with bruising emotional force, Solián‘s remarkably detailed performance making you feel every flinch and knuckle-crack. The precision of Cervera’s direction builds palpable dread in the most engrossing and clever ways, constructed with brilliant visual language. HUESERA is a profound blessing of a nightmare. – Mitch Davis
Showings
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