A gripping portrait of a Juárez factory worker who becomes an avenger after systemic violence against women goes unpunished, The Huntress (or La Cazadora) explores how myth, motherhood and desperation collide in a city where justice is scarce.
This is one in a series of film reviews from the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, focused on films by women, trans or nonbinary directors that tell compelling stories about the lives of women and girls.
Do you know the myth of Diana and Actaeon? Most notably recounted in Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses and also the subject of two famous paintings—Diana and Actaeon and The Death of Actaeon—by Renaissance master Titian, the tale sets down an act of divine vengeance by the virgin goddess of the hunt. In it, young hunter Actaeon stumbles upon Diana and her nymphs bathing nude in the forest. For this offense, Diana turns him into a stag, and Actaeon is pursued and torn to pieces by his own hounds.
This story has a symbolic function in The Huntress (La Cazadora), a Mexican/U.S. co-production written and directed by Suzanne Andrews Correa and part of the World Cinema Dramatic Competition at Sundance.
In late August 2013, a woman boarded two buses in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, both at 8 a.m., one day apart, and shot and killed their drivers. Then, she vanished, leaving only a message, attributed to her by the news outlets who received it, behind. Calling herself “Diana, Huntress of Bus Drivers,” the writer claimed she was an “instrument of vengeance for several women” who had been sexually assaulted by drivers who ferry women to and from work at isolated factories in the middle of the surrounding desert.
It’s this real-life vigilante that The Huntress takes as its subject, casting her as a factory worker named Luz (Adriana Paz) with a 14-year-old daughter, Ale (Jennifer Trejo), and imagining 24 hours in her life, beginning with the first shooting, which opens the film in a shocking tableau of violence. But Luz is no hardened criminal; she’s a desperate mother haunted by her own brutal rape years earlier and fearful of what could happen to Ale in a city where violence against women is frequent and often uninvestigated.
After the killing, Luz, intermittently vomiting and trembling, gets her unsuspecting boyfriend, Jaime (Eme Malafe), to take her to the computer chip factory where she works. Jaime is kind but harboring ongoing frustrations with the distance and lack of intimacy in their relationship, unwilling or perhaps unable to recognize the depth of Luz’s trauma.
At work, Luz struggles to stay focused, her only reprieve when coworker Clara (Leidi Gutiérrez), a victim of the driver Luz just killed and still bearing bruises and cuts from his assault, expresses relief over the news of his death. Luz’s slow, solitary smile allows her one moment of satisfaction in a film driven by her anxiety and pain.
… The writer claimed she was an ‘instrument of vengeance for several women’ who had been sexually assaulted by drivers who ferry women to and from work at isolated factories in the middle of the surrounding desert.
Reading Ovid, we might be tempted to protest that Actaeon’s death was unjustified, another example of a god acting rashly and with unrestrained violence—after all, he only encountered Diana by accident. But, when put into conversation with the poet’s other stories, wherein male gods pursue and rape mortal women with impunity and without consequence, Diana’s act of preemptive vengeance becomes, if not laudable, at least, understandable.
This same kind of conversation comes to bear in The Huntress with the introduction of Ximena (Teresa Sánchez), the quietly imposing leader of a group of women who spend their days digging in the desert for the bones of their disappeared daughters, sisters and friends. Ximena and Luz’s paths cross when the former picks a distraught Luz up on the side of the road after she refuses to ride a night bus where she would be the only passenger. Ximena, perhaps suspecting Luz’s identity, introduces her to the Roman figure of Diana, also the name of Ximena’s murdered daughter.
The police are not interested in helping find murdered and missing women and girls, and they do not care about women who are assaulted; their only concern is making the high-profile story of a female vigilante go away.
Ale’s sweetness and innocence also drives Luz and the arc of the film. At the beginning, the girl skips school in a typical act of teenage rebellion to coo over quinceañera dresses with her best friend, but as the two ride the bus and nervously giggle at the creepy advances of a male passenger, it’s clear how a child’s naivete can slip quickly into grave danger.
All along, the suspicions of a detective, who shows up at Luz’s workplace and follows her home, begin to coalesce. As he narrows his sites on Luz, the detective proves to be part of the problem, not a solution. The police are not interested in helping find murdered and missing women and girls, and they do not care about women who are assaulted; their only concern is making the high-profile story of a female vigilante go away.
This is Luz’s moment of decision. What can she do to protect her daughter while carving out a space for women to feel safe—or, at the very least, avenged?
“The most dangerous creature is a mother with nothing to lose,” Ximena tells the detective near the end of the film, a fitting message for a poignant film that refuses to be a simple morality tale.
Luz, fictionalized representative of the real-but-anonymous Diana the Huntress of Bus Drivers, takes on a bit of mythology herself. And The Huntress asks us to empathize with her as she makes the only choices left that are truly her own.
Great Job Aviva Dove-Viebahn & the Team @ Ms. Magazine for sharing this story.
