The best kind of horror operates on two different levels. There’s what’s happening on-screen… and what’s really going on. More than any other sub-genre, horror is capable of highlighting the most grotesque aspects of the human condition, and giving it an equally monstrous visage to show the monstrous within us. In Hatching, the debut feature from Finnish filmmaker Hanna Bergholm, this takes the form of Tinja (performed to perfection by young Siiri Solalinna), a child gymnast whose domestic life is as recognisable as it is horrifying.

Tinja lives in the world that her mother (Sophia Heikkilä) has arranged for all to see. A place of pastel colours, crystal glass, and selfie-sticks, all part of a living production put on to satisfy mother’s need for validation through vlogging. Between Heikkilä’s unnervingly real portrayal and Ilja Rautsi’s biting dialogue, mother’s sociopathic tendencies ring through with perfect clarity in her every action and word. In her world, everything exists solely as it reflects on her.

It’s quite the indictment on social media culture and how it latches onto the more hazardous aspects of the creative process (namely, how unhealthy it is when you treat all things in life as fuel for ‘content’), and Jarkko T. Laine’s cinematography really brings out the domestic darkness in the setting.

But comments on the Internet age seem almost incidental compared to what the film is really driving at: The effects of toxic femininity. Tinja’s mother has poured all of her unrealised ambitions and all her desires for praise into her child, and at her stage of development, it’s the kind of attitude that can take root and grow. So, when Tinja finds herself as the surrogate mother of an abandoned bird egg, a lot of what she has been subjected to is mirrored.

The practical effects by Gustav Hoegen and Conor O’Sullivan are all kinds of gruesome in the best way possible, but the true horror is more than skin-deep. As Tinja wrestles with the trauma she lives with, the secrets she’s been ‘suggested’ to keep, and how much her own identity has been suppressed so that her mother can express hers vicariously, the titular Hatching becomes an agent of her subconscious. A showing of just how much damage she’s suffered, and the damage it can cause in turn. Like mother, like daughter.

Hatching is a harrowing domestic thriller nesting in a visceral genre exercise, externalising some particularly vile behaviour and attitudes and highlighting just how much they can warp us as human beings. It’s an examination of childhood trauma as much as it is a critique of Toddlers & Tiaras-esque trophy parenting, and the revelations of where the two intersect make for chilling material. The film craft on offer here is incredible, and shows Hanna Bergholm as a talented filmmaker on par with Julia Ducournau in bringing out the feminine side of body horror.

Share: