There wasn’t a whole lot that I knew about this movie aside from it had gotten positive reviews and was mostly about a pregnant lady being terrorized by something. I was not expecting the focus that the film ended up having beyond the pregnancy. As someone that is both unable to bear and uninterested in having children, I might not have gotten as much out of this as others would.

Our main character here is Valeria, a woman that is trying to have a child and seems to have it all. She has a loving husband, a nice home, and has finally been able to get pregnant with her first kid. While preparing for having a child, she starts to be haunted by something that moves with unnatural cracking and has no mouth or eyes. Obviously nobody believes her when she says she sees this woman haunting her except for her super cool lesbian aunt who also knows a bunch of witches that might be able to help her with the whole weird monster thing.

The movie has a focus on the myth of the “perfect life” that comes at the loss of individual dreams. Valeria used to be a punk in a relationship with another woman. She had a shaved head and dreamed of a life with her girlfriend. We don’t know precisely what happened but when her brother died, she decided to go to college like her brother was going to because her family was so excited that there was going to be someone that went to college in the family. Apparently that was the first domino in her transformation from young queer punk into the picture of heteronormative family life. Thankfully, the movie is framed around how the aunt and her ex are the most supportive of what she’s going through and seems entirely supportive of not conforming to the standards that others would force on you.

While the messaging that empowers rather than vilifies queerness is refreshing to see in a horror movie, it’s also so much of the focus that you tend to lose the horror a lot of the time. We’re so caught up in the regret of a life fashioned to conform that you forget this is supposed to be a horror film and not just a drama about the harsh reality of growing up and pregnancy. Which isn’t to say that the movie is boring but it almost feels like the horror is such a thinly veiled metaphor that it doesn’t even need to be there. The sound quality of cracking knuckles and popping bones is exceptionally well done to be off-putting but the whole bone thing doesn’t really relate to anything outside a throwaway line that giving birth can feel like your bones are breaking. But since we keep that up even after she has given birth, it feels like its mostly their for the sake of being nasty sounding.

I wouldn’t say I disliked the movie. It has a lot going for it and the performances are great, especially from Natalia Solián as Valeria. It just didn’t resonate with me and I found myself thinking it was taking a while.

Score: 3 out of 5