Hatching (2022)

 

Director: Hanna Bergholm

Screenplay: Ilja Rautsi

Cast: Siiri Solalinna as Tinja / Alli, Sophia Heikkilä as the Mother, Jani Volanen as the Father, Reino Nordin as Tero, Oiva Ollila as Matias, Ida Määttänen as Reetta

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

A Finnish film, teen female gymnast Tinja (Siiri Solalinna) has a seemingly happy family, but the symbolic incident of the start, a bird hitting their lounge window and then causing damage when it gets into the house, sets up the emotional circumstances within this family. Tinja exists with an idyllic life which is not her own, as alongside the sense of her father and little brother as complete disconnected, to the point of being a joke by the final act, she is being moulded by her mother (Sophia Heikkilä). Even if willingly, her mother is pushing her beyond her limits, a figure who in doing video blogs about their perfect life and wishes for the highest expectations, the perfectly manicured woman and former athlete who wants her daughter to train to be the best even if Tinja is clearly not the best gymnast, but ones who tries and enjoys it if she was allowed to fail without grief. The beginning establishes this tension, traumatising her daughter by snapping the bird's neck and demanding Tinja places it into the organic waste herself.

The bird however refused to die until, having dragged itself all the way back to its nest, Tinja is forced to put it out of its misery by turning its head into mush with a rock. Guilty for her part in this, Tinja takes the egg from the nest to hatch at home. The subtext is blatantly visible, as she feeds it her anxieties and stresses until it grows unnaturally larger, the chaos that will be caused when the egg hatched representing the straw which breaks the camel's back. It is not only having her enjoyment of trying as a gymnast grounded down by her mother which is the issue, but that she is also confronted by learning her mother is having an affair with a younger man with child named Tero (Reino Nordin). Whilst her mother becomes a more complicated figure as the film goes on, the egg grows from Tinja's perception of her mother's dominance and shock of this alternative life, leading to the hatching itself.

Credit to the production, whilst the product of this sadness is only briefly seen, the hatchling is an actual monster chick, as interpreted by director Hanna Bergholm with her collaborators, including the animatronic designer Gustav Hoegen, is rendered with puppetry in the brief time we see of it, part of this fascinating melding of a quasi-folklore story, adolescent fairy tale and gruesome horror. What suggests initially a heart warming tale of Tinja bonding with her giant monster chick, hiding it in her bedroom, even if we have to depict having her regurgitate food to feed the creature, goes out the window when it destroys the neighbour's dog, something the family without realising the cause of will hide the evidence of from the neighbour in probably one of the sickest humoured scenes.

Including even nods to puberty and growing up at least with one of the more broadly comedic scenes, there is significantly more nuisance here from the get-go with the story, with the director's film dealing with a broader folklore tale set in the modern day. There are a lot of nods and themes which become the many parts of its text, becoming far more twisted as the chick grows up to become more and more Tinja's doppelganger. Connected to her psychically, including that Tinja suffers the physical injuries the hatchling does, it is linked to her anger as well, and to the point of horror for Tinja as she cannot control its actions, such as when it will go out and maim a girl in her gymnastics' class fed off this anger.

One of Hatching's biggest virtues is the sense of all these characters being three dimensional. Tero for example, as a side character who could have been stereotyped in the worst possible light, but he is depicted as a kind man who shows sympathy for Tinja. It is understandable when he becomes violent when the doppelganger, thinking it is Tinja, is found taking an axe to his baby girl. Whilst the burden of the mother onto the daughter does not pull punches in the damndest, the relationship is allowed to connect when the mother realises the horror of what is happening, a figure unaware of her complicit involvement with only closeness coming sharing knives with Tinja to hunt hatchlings. What does add the cherry on the cake of Hatching, which however undermines this heart warming bond, is a pitch perfect and opening ended ending, a bleak one from a spooky ghost tale which perfectly gives you so many imaginary epilogues of what the aftermath of it transpiring would be for the family afterwards. With zero knowledge of the film beforehand, this was a case of a film catching me out of nowhere, and applaudable in its successes.