Pahanhautoja | Finland/Sweden | 2022 | Directed by Hanna Bergholm
Logline: A young gymnast, with an overbearing mother, finds distraction with the discovery of a strange egg, that hatches and reveals the girl’s nemesis.
From the dark woods of Scandinavia comes this weird little horror tale. Like Thale and Border, a kind of perverse creature feature, one that takes a portrait of domestic dysfunction and churns it into a coming-of-age mutation. We’ve seen these kinds of nightmarish fables before, but filmmaker Hanna Bergholm (who provided the story) and screenwriter Ilja Ratsi add a fresh scent to a fetid hide.
Tinja (Siiri Solalinna) is twelve, on the precipice of adolescence. She is a budding gymnast, but struggles under the demands of her mother, who is obsessed with her role as an influencer via a vlog that focuses on their apparently average, but very happy family. Tinja’s father seemingly takes a backseat to parental duties, while her kid brother does his best to please. Everything appeared to be okay, but following a disturbing incident with a panicked crow inside the house, causing damage and disarray, and later Tinja walking in on her mother passionately kissing the repairman, Tinja seeks solace in the adjacent forest where she comes across a dying bird and its abandoned egg. She decides to nurture the egg secretly in her bedroom, and things quickly escalate into very strange territory.
The egg grows to enormous size (somehow the rest of the family never discover it) and eventually a creature emerges, a kind of hybrid crow-human. Initially it appears the creature is malevolent, but because Tinja acted as a surrogate mother, the creature sees her as friend, not foe. In fact, the creature has made a firm, supernatural bond with the young girl, and everything they experience is shared psychologically and physically.
While dominant mother and submissive father sub-plot weaves through the narrative, it is the journey of Tinja and her wayward pet she names Alli that provides the movie with its central story. Like David Lynch’s predilection for digging below the surface of what appears pleasant and normal to reveal a dark and hideous underbelly, Hatching depicts the ruinous nature of toxic parenting, the frustrations of stifled youth. This is a tale of duplicity and failure in various forms.
The performances are uniformly excellent, especially Solalinna, who has the difficult job of a dual role, but also Sophia Heikkilä, as the mother. Big props to Bergholm for opting to use animatronics instead of CGI for the creature effects. It brings much gravitas to the early creature scenes. The beast is genuinely repulsive, and yet, the terrific puppet work brings a powerful realism to the outlandish creation.
This is the stuff of fevered nightmares, the frightening changeling that threatens to consume everything, the once protective custody of family falling apart, of innocence being torn asunder as a manipulative monster reflection seizes control, and the psyche is under threat. Like bad dreams there’s an internal logic that operates outside of reality. Tinja’s family frequently seem to be absent or none-the-wiser, while she deals with her noisy nemesis upstairs in her bedroom, showing up just when is dramatically required. Yes, there is a poetic license hard at work within Hatching, bordering on the blackly comic and absurd.
The Europeans are always pushing the envelope in terms of what is thematically comfortable within genre films, and Hatching is no exception. Like Goodnight Mommy and Let the Right One In, Hatching takes the psychological darkness of horror and pushes it into the sunlight, the rays singeing its constraints, the claws scraping and tearing at the bright, clean surfaces. It’s a provocative and ambiguous work, yet one that is likely to appeal to a broad demographic, I look forward to where Bergholm goes next.