Finnish director Hanna Bergholm made a witty and unnerving baby-body-horror movie with her 2022 debut Hatching about a creepy giant egg, a complex, psychologically plausible study of family dysfunction in which the idea of fertility plays an important part. And now … she has given these ideas a retread with this programmatic and unsubtly acted film, a scary movie about a monstrous newborn that is very much less interesting and original than Hatching; the paganism is cliched and the element of black comedy – so often the alibi for not being scary in films like this – is really not all that funny. The face and body of the screeching VFX model devil-baby itself is mostly never shown to the audience, an omission that does not seem disturbing but rather an admission that this prop wouldn’t look convincing in plain sight.
Saga (Seidi Haarla) and her stolid British husband Jon (Rupert Grint) have come to live in Saga’s dilapidated family home in the remote Finnish forest, planning to fix it up so that it can be a lovely place to bring up what they hope will be a big family. (Fixing up this place would in the real world take a couple of years while they lived somewhere else, but they more or less manage it unaided in about two weeks.) Saga is obscurely moved and excited by the vital subterranean forces throbbing in the dark depths of the forest that surrounds the house. They have passionate sex there but the resulting baby is a brutal, hirsute, bloodsucking troll that destroys Saga’s marriage and happiness.
Saga’s unsentimentally down-to-earth mother (nicely played by Pirkko Saisio) is pretty callous, remarking that as a baby Saga was herself a vampiric, nutrition-sucking nightmare. Jon’s parents, played by John Thomson and Rebecca Lacey, are not much more help; the dad is a clergyman who insists on baptising the child in a fireside ceremony with ghastly results. And where is it all leading? Well, to nothing but grief for poor Saga, who unlike pregnant Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby, doesn’t break through to an extended period of calm or acceptance. Some amusing moments, but a disappointment after the excellent Hatching.
• Nightborn screened at the Berlin film festival
