‘A Child of My Own’ Berlinale Review: A Gentle True Crime Fable

The image illustrating this review (see above) isn’t a behind-the-scenes still from the shoot, but a frame from the film itself—or at least from one part of it. In it, director Maité Alberdi is seen staging a scene from a movie that is neither fully fiction nor fully documentary, but a hybrid that incorporates its own making-of into the narrative. In other words, it’s a real-life story told partly as fiction, partly as documentary, stitched together by those usually invisible threads that connect a film’s ideas to the process of filmmaking itself.

The Chilean director of The Mole Agent shot A Child of My Own for Netflix in Mexico with the collaboration of Argentine screenwriters Julián Loyola and Esteban Student. What they’ve crafted is, essentially, a story drawn from Mexico’s crime pages—though a comparatively mild one by the standards of what typically makes the news. That’s not to say the story itself is light, but Alberdi’s approach to it certainly is. Told like an odd fairy tale—a mix of family drama and procedural—Un hijo propio opens with a casting session that suggests the reconstruction of events will be performed by actors. Alberdi appears onscreen alongside various performers until the role of Alejandra is ultimately assigned to Ana Celeste Montalvo.

Who is Alejandra? According to her own account—delivered in voiceover as we watch staged reenactments of her story—she’s a young Mexican woman who married while pregnant and soon after lost the baby. Following a second miscarriage, and under mounting pressure from both her family and, especially, her husband to have a child, she experiences a chance encounter that changes everything. At a clinic, she meets another young woman facing the opposite dilemma: newly pregnant and determined either to terminate the pregnancy or give the child up for adoption. Without speaking to anyone or entering any legal process, the two agree that she will simply hand over the baby to Alejandra right there in the delivery room.

The film’s first half is devoted to telling this story, but when the moment arrives, things grow more complicated and the plan begins to unravel. At that point, A Child of My Own leans more heavily into its documentary side—without entirely abandoning fiction—to examine not only what happened after the failed “adoption,” but also everything that led up to it, now from the perspective of other figures involved: lawyers, witnesses, alleged victims, and so on. The question that lingers is whether there was ever truly an agreement between the two women for the transfer of the child—or whether it was, in fact, a straightforward case of kidnapping.

The film plays with both possibilities, adopting a surprisingly warm, even fairy-tale-like tone for a story that could easily have been framed as a dark piece of true crime. Alberdi’s portrayal of Alejandra is key to understanding this approach. However complex the legal and ethical ramifications of the case may be, the empathy between the director of La once and her protagonist—a woman pressured by family, partners, and social expectations into becoming a mother at any cost—is unmistakable. After repeated miscarriages, Alejandra herself seems to blur the boundaries between fiction and reality, dream and nightmare.

In that sense, the film’s blend of genres feels less like a postmodern flourish than a reflection—more or less realistic—of Alejandra’s shifting emotional state at each stage of the story. The tale of this naïve young woman who wants nothing more than to be a mother, and who stumbles upon an unthinkable opportunity to become one, is told as a fairy tale because that’s how Alejandra sees it. When that self-fashioned fiction collides with reality, the tone inevitably changes. Yet the film maintains its gentle, compassionate gaze, even as the Mexican press turns her into a monster. That perspective is what allows A Child of My Own to become more than an ingenious formal exercise: it’s a tender fantasy about the ideal worlds we construct for ourselves when the real one intrudes to shatter the illusion.