The drive for perfection proves cataclysmic for a Finnish family in Hanna Bergholm's assured debut.
Tinja (Siiri Solalinna), a 12-year-old gymnast, lives in a model home with her model family. A wave rolls across that placid surface when an agitated crow flies through an open window and raises a ruckus, destroying several pieces of pricey-looking glassware, including a chandelier. Tinja captures the corvid without incident, but as she prepares to bring it outside, her mother sweetly requests that she hand her the bird—and swiftly breaks its neck.
Mother (Sophia Heikkilä) maintains a vlog called Happy Everyday Life where she posts scenes from her perfect life. If she forgets about the crow, Tinja doesn't, especially when it wakes her up, an unexpected occurrence since it appears to be dead. She finds it screeching in pain in the forest and puts it out of its misery. When she notices a nest, she takes the egg home.
At school, Tinja works on her gymnastic routine but doesn't mingle with the other girls, who find her odd. They aren't quite so intense, though the drive for perfection has left her lonely. Then, she catches her mother in a compromising situation with another man (Jani Volanen plays her weak-willed dad). The outside world may not know it, but this family is far from perfect.
As the egg grows—something eggs aren't supposed to do—Tinja hides it in a teddy bear. Meanwhile, a new family moves in next door. Tinja is delighted to find that dog lover Reetta (Ida Määttänen) is also a gymnast, though Tinja's win-at-all-costs mother worries she'll take the last coveted spot on the team, and so she trains her daughter, punishingly, in their off hours. Then, the egg hatches. What emerges is neither cute nor cuddly. And it will soon act out her every repressed impulse.
After a rough start, Tinja becomes its mother. The bird, which has Gremlin qualities, responds to her care but proves a menace to others. It has to eat, after all. Bergholm presents these feeding episodes from the creature's point of view. It's a menace, but it’s Tinja's menace, and a bond develops between the two. The rest of the film revolves around her attempts to care for this carnivorous beastie and to cover up its crimes, a job made more difficult by her bratty brother Matias (Oiva Ollila).
As the situation grows more chaotic, the family resembles a vase riddled with hairline fractures that widen, threatening to crack apart. Hatching opens as satire, but when it shifts into body horror, Bergholm goes all the way with the concept as anger, jealousy, and hypocrisy feed the monster, transforming it from a bird-like creature into something horrifically human.
The results are genuinely unsettling, due in part to imaginatively gory creature effects from Ex Machina's Gustav Hoegen in combination with the committed performances from Heikkilä and newcomer Solalinna, who really sell the premise, no matter how over-the-top the screenplay from Bergholm and cowriter Ilja Rautsi gets. Not for the squeamish.
What type of library programming could use this title?
Library programming on Scandinavian or Finnish films, contemporary folk horror, or chillers about mothers and daughters, like Brian De Palma's Stephen King adaptation Carrie, could well use Hatching.
What kind of film series would this horror film fit in?
Hatching would fit with film series on Scandinavian or Finnish horror or those involving folk horror. It would also fit with suspense films involving creatures of flight, like Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds or Larry Cohen's Q: The Winged Serpent.
What kind of film collection would this title be suitable for?
Hatching would be a fine choice for foreign-language and horror shelves in academic and public libraries.