Finnish director Hanna Bergholm’s first feature, Hatching, is an ambitious deep-dive into the realm of body horror, creature features, and the horrors of adolescence. It pulls from a number of horror flick tropes but repackages them with an off-kilter perfection that mirrors the protagonist's mother’s uncomfortable attempt at projecting a perfect life onto her family.
Tinja (Siiri Solalinna) is a young teenage gymnast who lives in the picture-perfect world that her blogger mother (Sophia Heikkilä) has manufactured from behind the lens of her camera phone. Despite her whimsical wardrobe and perfectly designed home life, Tinja is cracking under the pressure of her mother’s expectations—or rather, eggpectations. In the opening sequence of the film, a vlogging session turns into a Hitchcockian nightmare, as a bird bursts into the house and breaks nearly every breakable item in its path. The first crack in her mother’s façade of perfection is delivered with the swift death of the flighty fiend.
Later that evening, because this is a very whimsical Northern European horror that is infused with fairytale aesthetics, Tinja wanders out into the fog-filled forest and discovers a bird egg, seemingly belonging to the recently departed blackbird. Like a magpie drawn to something shiny, Tinja takes the egg home with her and safely tucks it into bed. To her surprise, the egg begins to grow larger and larger—before hatching into a truly terrifying bird-like creature, that confirms that birds should never have hands.
From there, Ilja Rautsib’s screenplay takes a swan dive into a very metaphorical exploration of girlhood, as the humanoid bird takes flight as the manifestation of Tinja’s fears, resentment, and anxieties, all of which are a direct result of her mother’s untenable expectations for her daughter. And there’s no mistaking the allegory of Tinja puking to feed her evil doppelgänger, when so much of her life is wrapped up in her mother shaping her into the perfect gymnast, in fact, her mother cruelly references her losing “baby fat” which is at odds with Tinja’s bony spine and rail-thin frame. But it underlines the way the world, through her mother’s camera lens, expects her to appear.
Tinja’s mother isn’t the only hawkish figure circling her, she also has to contend with her irksome younger brother (Oiva Ollila) and her dreadfully dull father (Jani Volanen) who is so detached from reality that he is oblivious to his wife’s extramarital affair with the handsome widower Tero (Reino Nordin) who comes to repair their home. Even as the hatchling’s plot takes flight, the script keeps itself grounded in the day-to-day of Tinja’s life. When she falters on the high beam, we see her pushed to practice more and more. We see her struggle to connect with her fellow gymnasts and attempt to make friends with the girl next door.
With creature features, the creature design is as tantamount as the plot, and Hatching delivers an uncomfortably realistic winged beast that feels torn out of the pages of a Grimm brothers’ fairytale or pulled from the cinematic realms of Guillermo del Toro. It exists within a disquieting place where sympathy can be extended to something truly horrifying.
Bergholm manages to keep Hatching at just under an hour and a half, ensuring that her audience is never too overwhelmed with the grotesque imperfection of its protagonist and her twisted transformation. It may not be a groundbreaking horror film, but it certainly is a compelling one that gives wing to new metaphors.
Grade: B
Hatching premiered at Sundance this week and is set to soar into theaters on April 29, 2022.