Editor’s Note: Vanyaland Film Editor Nick Johnston is here in Boston, but his heart is in Utah as he remotely covers the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. This year’s Sundance is a virtual edition, but that’s not stopping the film premieres from flowing. Check out our official Sundance preview, scan through all our Sundance 2022 reviews as they are published, and check out our full archives of past festivals.
Finnish director Hanna Bergholm’s new horror film Hatching has all the makings of a classical fairy tale, which is part of its appeal. I don’t mean this in the Disneyfied sense, where the tales of the Brothers Grimm were relieved of their cultural idiosyncrasies (and given that they were, after all, folk tales, they were chock-full of things that would make even the hardest stan blush if that company brought them to the screen) and were reappropriated for mass consumption, but it’s the kind of unreal and metaphorical nightmare that that fantastical morality plays served up to the masses back in the days before the printing press and the standardization of narrative. It’s deliciously high-concept in its plotting, stylishly crafted, and it’s in-and-out before it can wear out its welcome, coming in just below 90 minutes. In short, it’s a lot of fun, provided that you’re on board with what Bergholm’s doing. It’s one of the delights of Sundance’s Midnighters line-up so far, and it makes sense that it came to this festival with distribution already in place: This may prove to be a hit with the kind of crowd that IFC Midnight seeks out.
Hatching tells the tale of Tinja (Siiri Solianna), a girl on the verge of teenagerhood, who is both a talented gymnast and, perhaps, the only person in her family who has a heart. She lives under the thumb of her domineering mother (Sophia Heikkilä), a mommy blogger and influencer who, though not outwardly abusive in the way of the classical stepmother in these tales, still wields her cruelty in subtle ways. Her house must be perfect, perpetually ready for the Gram or YouTube, and her subservient husband seems either oblivious to her various affairs or resigned to them. During an “idyllic” morning photoshoot in their white-and-pink living room, a crow breaks through their window and causes all sorts of chaos. Tinja captures the poor creature and presents it to her mother, hoping that she’ll do something with it. Instead, she snaps its neck and tosses it into the garbage. Hours later, Tinja notices that the crow’s gone missing. Wandering into the woods, she finds that it was headed towards its nest, where a solitary egg lays in need of mothering. Tinja takes it upon herself to ensure that it’s looked after, and nestles it in her bed, out of view from her mother.
But, given that this is a horror movie, things don’t go quite as expected: the egg slowly begins to grow in size, and slowly becomes almost as large as Tinja herself. After one sad day at practice, the egg hatches and reveals the genuinely creepy creature that was inside of it: A hybrid of human-and-crow, executed to perfection by Bergholm’s team. It is perfectly haunting and ugly, and it is absolutely terrified of poor Tinja. It flees the scene, crashing out of the window in the middle of the night, and Tinja hopes that it’ll be the last she ever sees of it. But the creature comes back the next day, and the girl realizes that it sees her as its mother, and that she must take care of it. So she attempts to hide it from her family even as it grows and changes, and becomes needier and needier, all the while as it seems to have some sort of psychic connection to the girl. When things begin to go poorly for her, the creature lashes out, and some truly unpredictable shit happens, though if one were to see this from the lens as being about the end of childhood, it is perfectly predictable.
If you’re on board with this level of absurdity, Bergholm’s film is full of simple pleasures: Its sets are exquisitely designed, with a special amount of attention paid to capturing the vacuity of a kind of influencer style in its dressing, and its magical elements are wonderfully realized with equal parts of ugly tactility and sensationalism. It unfolds at a decent clip, with what fat remains on the bone seeming to come from a need to get to feature-length (an extended digression with one of Tilja’s mother’s suitors is fine, but ultimately feels superfluous), and hardcore gorehounds might be disappointed by its occasional mildness. But Hatching feels like the kind of horror film that is meant to speak to viewers close to the age of the protagonist at their level (or to those who can clearly remember what that era was like), and if one went harder with the more difficult aspects of the genre, that mixture of sensitivity and tenderness might be lost in the shuffle. It’s a sweetly devastating little tale, deserving of the care and kindness which it hatched.