Hanna Bergholm‘s films are not subtle. Not in the way you might expect them to be, anyway.
Bergholm’s debut, the skin-crawlingly gnarly and bitingly funny Hatching, puts its thematic concerns directly in the audience’s face, hammering home the point it was making about female puberty and the staggering expectations that come with growing up, but brushes in much more subtly along the way as it explores the complex tangle of emotions that come with those expectations. In that way, it becomes a film of surprising depth while also stirring up all those wonderful ghoulish body horror moments.
Bergholm’s follow-up, the Fantasia Award-winning Nightborn, functions in much the same way, with an added maturity befitting its subject matter. A dark tale of motherhood, folk horror, and body horror about the various monstrosities that come with motherhood, it’s evidence of Bergholm’s growth as an artist from film to film, and one of this year’s must-see features.
Saga (Seidi Haarla) and her new husband Jon (Rupert Grint) have just moved to rural Finland, hoping to fix up Saga’s grandmother’s old house, move in, and raise a family on the edge of a forest so magical they even conceive their first child there, nestled among the gnarled trees and the thick, verdant moss. It’s idyllic, the perfect way to start their new lives together, at least until the baby is born.
A rough birth soon gives way to a newborn with odd features, from strangely sharp teeth and nails — though, to be fair, all babies have razor-sharp nails, so look out — to a body covered in dark, wolfish hair. Saga’s taken aback, but doctors assure the couple the baby is perfectly healthy, just a little, well, different. As the baby grows, and all the usual concerns of motherhood come up, Jon does his best to be the supportive partner and father, and wave away every fear Saga has about their child. But the more time Saga spends with her son, a child she insists on calling “it,” the more she wonders if the forest held more than trees and moss.
As with her previous feature, the surface-level metaphors in Bergholm’s film, which she co-wrote with Hatching collaborator Ilja Rautsi, are both quite clear and quite heavy. The body horror of postpartum life is dialed up early and all the way to 11, from the way the baby chews at Saga’s nipples to the way her clothes don’t seem to fit anymore to the constant, insistent wailing from the creature in the crib. Any parent or anyone who’s simply never wanted kids of their own for exactly these reasons and more can relate to these moments, the sense of being unmoored from the shared reality of the rest of the world (even, for added horror, your spouse), and the feeling that the living being you’re tasked with caring for simply does not care about you in the least.
Those early months of parenting are often thankless and maddening, and Bergholm depicts that with vibrant shades of body horror and encroaching madness, helped along by a production design which seems to suggest that, despite the couple’s best efforts, the house is receding back into the forest.
Which brings us to the no-less-subtle but arguably more vibrant folk horror shades in the film. Despite Jon’s best efforts to modernize their country home – complete with an electric car charging station and a robot lawnmower which serves as the film’s best recurring joke – the forest seems to keep reaching back to take over, its roots and saplings sprouting with impossible speed as Saga and Jon’s child takes a greater interest in things beyond breast milk and simple toys. It’s all beautifully done, right down to the green wallpaper that seems to swallow the house like a mossy curtain, and it builds to the subtler shades Bergholm’s managed to layer into her sophomore effort.
It would be easy for Nightborn to go the simplest route and become a simple changeling story. After all, there’s a reason those legends have persisted for centuries; sometimes your kid just feels like a monster, and the more they assert their personality, the more they can feel less like a part of you and more like an invader in your home. In real life, these moments are temporary, even fleeting, but the anxiety remains, and here Bergholm runs that anxiety like a white-hot wire through the whole film, forcing Saga to confront her own bestial nature and her child’s increasingly unorthodox needs until the whole picture is thick with dread.
But even with the potency of its darkness, Nightborn also showcases Bergholm’s talent for oddball, dark comedy, something very well-served by the casting of both Haarla and Grint. Just as he did with Servant, Grint plays a phenomenal horror straight man, but this time with an added softness. He’s a supportive husband, a good guy, who just wants to build a family with the woman he loves, and yet everything around him is increasingly bonkers and feral. It’s a highwire act, and he pulls it off.
Even with Grint’s supporting brilliance in mind, though, Haarla is the clear star. As her baby grows and changes, so too does Saga, and Haarla’s ability to pivot from gentle and curious to wild-eyed and furious is the linchpin on which the whole film turns. She’s incredible.
There’s a richness to Nightborn that, for me at least, Hatching never quite achieved. Bergholm hasn’t lost her knack for wielding metaphor and thematic arcs with blunt-yet-artful force, but there’s an added depth here too, a sense of exploration and nuance that shows a filmmaker who’s still growing, still mastering her craft and dreaming up new horrors for a hungry audience. It’s a chilling artistic breakthrough, and an announcement that Hanna Bergholm is not just here to stay, but getting better all the time.
Nightborn premieres July 31 on Shudder.
