DIRECTOR: Hanna Bergholm
CAST: Siiri Solalinna, Sophia Heikkilä, Jani Volanen, Reino Nordin, Oiva Ollila, Saija Lentonen, Ida Määttänen
RUNNING TIME: 86 mins
CERTIFICATE: 15
BASICALLY…: A young gymnast (Solalinna) discovers a strange egg, which soon hatches into a terrifying creature…
NOW FOR THE REVIEW…
Leave it to first-time Finnish filmmaker Hanna Bergholm to gently remind audiences of the kind of horror movie that you just don’t see that much of anymore. Hatching is a film that encompasses gruesome body horror, supernatural creatures, unnerving family tension, and sly metaphors for blossoming womanhood, but in a way where each and every element plays into each other rather wonderfully, almost like a particularly dark fairy tale where the heroes and villains are – sometimes literally – indistinguishable from each other.
It’s a bizarre, but endlessly engrossing, ride that will likely perplex most viewers, but leave the more patient ones astounded by the raw talent on display here.
The film focuses on a Finnish family who appear to be the ideal unit; the mother (Sophia Heikkilä), an image-obsessed influencer, creates vlogs intended to show a “normal” family life with her husband (Jani Volanen) and their two children, 12-year-old gymnast Tinja (Siiri Solalinna), and younger brother Matias (Oiva Ollila). Off-camera, though, the family is quite dysfunctional, with Tinja in particular feeling the blow of her mother’s endless pushing to be perfect in every aspect. An incident with a crow leads the young girl to discover and care for its egg, which slowly grows to enormous size and eventually hatches into a strange creature that ends up forming quite the connection with the suppressed Tinja – often to rather violent ends.
Through a concise and tightly wound script by Ilja Rautsi, Bergholm conveys a quietly powerful handling of the horror genre, with clear emphasis on the warped dynamic of the characters over cheap, unnecessary jump-scares. The more we get to know this family, especially this rather monstrous mother who doesn’t even bother trying to hide her extra-marital affair with a handsome handyman, the more we see the true ugliness within them that no fancy filter can hide, leaving them to seem more rotten and freakish than the actual creature that shows up later. Said creature, impressively brought to life by practical puppetry, serves as the coping mechanism for poor Tinja, who frequently suffers her mother’s borderline-abusive directions, her father’s cuckolded whimpering, and her brattish brother’s petty torments. Elevated by an astonishing performance by young actress Siiri Solalinna, you really feel for this character as she struggles to live up to her family’s cruel idea of what she should be, while also attempting to break free of their restrictive and self-centred grasp in some truly shocking means (without spoilers, Solalinna also pulls double-duty as another character, and it makes for an effective doppelganger resolution).
Bergholm is smart to also choose her scariest moments wisely, bringing in gore and tension exactly when they need to be brought in, but also adding a chilling aesthetic to her scenery which cleverly ties in to some of the underlying themes. The family’s house is amusingly glossy, with an old-fashioned décor you would normally find on Instagram, and drenched in artificial lighting as though it’s camera-ready for one of the mother’s vacuous family vlogs. It’s always eerie to look at because everything looks so fake and manufactured, but in a way that highlights the hollow emptiness at the core of this family, and which this fierce creature seeks to disrupt by simply acting out the internalised furore of this young girl caught in the middle of it. You can certainly feel the fairy tale vibes through this filmmaking, as it tells this strange fantastical story that comes complete with allegorical commentary on the more vapid aspects of society, as well as some choice moments to highlight the natural awkwardness surrounding early puberty (one gag sees Tinja’s father mistake a patch of blood on her bedsheets – really from a decapitated dog corpse – for menstruation, and chooses to bolt out of the room without confronting the situation).
It is an impressive film, effective and engrossing in all the right ways, but it is not something that general audiences are going to warm just as easily to. There were a surprising amount of walk-outs at the screening I attended for this film, and to an extent it is understandable, given the bizarre creature-feature angle and the heavy satire on overly-publicised family life. However, for my money, it is one of the year’s stronger horror movies, because it dares to do things that few films of this genre nowadays tend to do, like focus more on building and developing character rather than stick to the “one scare per ten minutes” formula, using practical effects instead of relying on CGI, and not being afraid to make anyone, from infant children to animals, susceptible to a possible mauling. It’s gutsy, gorgeous to look at, and above all smart – if you’re willing to give Hatching a chance, make sure to incubate it and preserve its profound fairy tale weirdness.
SO, TO SUM UP…
Hatching is a smart and effective horror film that places character and fairy-tale plotting over cheap scares and excessive gore, making you either love or hate the right people in the right ways, and carefully delivering its slightly familiar but still gripping social commentary on vapid family lifestyles and suppressed emotional torture.
