Two‑time Oscar nominee Maite Alberdi once again blurs the boundary between documentary and dramatization in A Child of My Own, a hybrid portrait that examines the shocking unraveling of a Mexican woman’s fabricated pregnancy. Alberdi, whose previous work such as The Territory and The Eternal Memory has leaned into emotional documentary storytelling with remarkable tact experiments here with an aesthetic that feels partially scripted, partially observational. The result is a film that oscillates between raw human vulnerability and stylized theatricality.
At the heart of the story is a woman whose obsession with belonging, validation, and identity drives her to enact a pregnancy that never existed a deception that ripples outward, affecting family, community, and ultimately, the audience’s perception of truth. Alberdi’s hybrid approach, integrating staged sequences with real testimony, heightened imagery with documentary fragments, heightens the emotional impact in places, yet occasionally diffuses it in others. Rather than allowing the natural cadence of lived experience to reveal itself, the film’s artifice sometimes calls attention to itself, muddying the viewer’s sense of what is genuine and what is constructed.
There’s something undeniably compelling about watching someone’s internal life spill outward in increasingly dramatic ways: the hope, denial, shame, and desperation are all palpable. But the tension between stylization and reportage leaves the viewer unsettled not just by the subject’s story, but by the film’s own relationship to truth. Does the hybrid form enrich empathy or does it distract from understanding? Alberdi’s choice to manipulate narrative form is bold, but here it yields mixed payoffs.
Ultimately, A Child of My Own is haunting, emotionally abrasive in all the right ways, and thoughtfully executed, even if its genre‑bending experiment doesn’t entirely cohere. It’s a film that lingers as much for its human complexity as for the questions it raises about the nature of storytelling itself.
