Film Review - Hatching (2022)

Horror is a genre steeped in many things of our lives. Some of those features include the trials tribulations of Motherhood along with growing up. Hannah Bergholm’s delightfully surreal horror Hatching embraces female adolescence that becomes the monster of her striking feature debut.

I am no expert of the ins and outs of every stage a girl goes through to become a woman. Like Sons becoming their fathers, the same can be said about Daughters and their Mothers. A bond that can be equally angelic as much as it can be cataclysmic.

Our film’s protagonist is 12 year old old Tinja (Siiri Solalinna). She wants to please her social media savvy mother (Sophia Heikkilä) on every level. Training intensively to be the perfect gymnast, with Tinja’s mother pushing her to get that last place in the team. When we first meet Tinja and her family is through an Instagram video her Mother of the ‘happy family life’ which includes her father (Jani Volanen), and her little brother, Matias (Oiva Ollila).

In this video the family life (entitled Lovely Everyday Life) looks sugar coated. They live a comfortable middle class life in a house that decorated like something straight out of Laura Ashley catalogue. It feels false , more like a nesting to nurture, a Fairy tale. The pantomime of perfection is interrupted by a raven flying into the window. Tinja grabs it and her mother snaps it’s neck. Soon in the forest she brings the strange egg she finds home and what emerges becomes her friend. Also her living nightmare.

Hatching opening reminds me a little of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. In that scene we see that perfect suburbia, The American dream. Slowly as the camera pans down under the soil we get the true picture of that dream. A narrative that’s dark, disturbing, an underbelly of the utopian dreamscape. In Hatching after the opening scene we quickly learn this so called perfect family ain’t that perfect. Obsession, broken dreams (the mother has a scar on her leg indicates failed dreams. Pushing her girl not to be a failure, she also has extra martial affairs. Her husband is not the one wearing the tros in this relationship with Mattias nothing more than a brat. The symbolism of the Raven plays important part of the narrative too. The bird has always seen a symbol of death and bad fortune, also rebirth, good fortune starting anew.

What emerges from the Egg that has been growing daily is a bird like creature. The creature may come across something like ET morphing into an unnerving being like from the pods in Invasion Of The Body Snatchers as Alli Tinja calls it grows. Looking after Alli brings out new Motherly like instincts from the Tinja. How she feeds her takes the film into another layers. Concerning her Mental Health and eating disorders which girls of similar age group worry about.

Alli starts out as an animatronics, something you would have found in the Jim Henson playbook. It’s invigorating to see a film willing to use practical effects rather than ruin with CGI.

Is this creature really the true monster of the film or is or her mother? She uses Tinja as her own vehicle to her own lost youth, Alli is slowly becoming Tinja and her true violent nature is revealed when the neighbours dog is killed.

Hatching is an oppressive horror that uses the true horrors of humanity, female adolescence whilst challenging our relationships with our families. The innocence of childhood sheds it’s shell. Siiri Solalinna is wonderful as our heroine. She carries the heavy weight of the film, drowning in emotional turmoil as she tries to understand her new awakening.

Hannah Bergholm’s Hatching is an elegantly, claustrophobic, absurd genre bending body horror. It’s called life.