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’Hatching’ review: Dir. Hanna Bergholm [Sundance 2022]

Finnish filmmaker Hanna Bergholm has brought both the beautiful and the bizarre to Sundance 2022 with her latest offering, Hatching. After Tinja (Siiri Solalinna) stumbles across an orphaned egg in a forest, she decides to take it home to look after. What follows is an enchanting journey through broken families and self-discovery in a film that isn’t easily forgotten. 

Courtesy of Sundance Institute

Tinja is a young girl struggling under the enormous weight of expectation. These expectations are thrust upon her by her nameless mother (played by Sophia Heikkil?), a former failed figure-skater who insists her daughter be the best gymnast there ever was. Her own failure to succeed has forced her to live through her daughter, and her need to win sees her ignore her child’s feelings and aptitude toward the sport. Tinja’s heart isn’t in gymnastics, but her desire to be the perfect daughter keeps her prisoner in the world of competition. It’s a scenario that reflects a lot of parent and child dynamics, mothers and fathers always keen for their offspring to thrive and be better than they were, but the mother here pushes it to villainous levels. Outside of pushing her daughter into realising her own failed dreams, Tinja’s mother enforces a strict protocol of perfection on every facet of life. She even runs her own lifestyle blog, subjecting the entire family to keeping up the facade of being superhuman. Her posts fabricate a warped reality, complete with white costumes and cheesy smiles, that masks the brattish behaviour of Tinja’s brother, and the loveless and lifeless marriage of her parents. Modern society’s reliance on social media, and to appear perfect on it,  especially when it comes to family life, is a real problem and the issue is expertly skewered here. As involved in Tinja’s life as her overbearing mother is, their relationship is missing a key element: love. So when Tinja finds and hatches a curious egg from the woods, the young girl seeks to compensate for her own lack of maternal love by becoming a doting mother to newborn Alli, with the expected devastating results for all involved. 

Jarkko T. Laine’s cinematography, Päivi Kettunen’s production design, the art direction of Juris Zhukovskis, and the costume work of Ulrika Sjölin, conjure up a magical playground for writer Ilja Rautsi’s haunted and twisted story. Each component subverts what one would expect from a film classed within the horror genre. There are no dull colours or black shadows, nor are there any stiff or spiky fabrics. The colour palette sticks purely to light pastel hues, the setting to big flower-patterned wallpapers and the costume consists of light and airy clothing in an array of bright whites, cotton candy pinks and yet more flower patterns. Their combined efforts proves that a horror film can look any way imaginable, so long as it has the terrifying tale to back it up.

There is certainly enough substance contained in Rautsi’s words to keep the viewer on the edge of their seats. The visuals may be bright and light, but the story is the polar opposite effortlessly pushing its unconventional appearance into a recognisable horror landscape. In case the viewer is thrown by the look of Hatching is fast to get to the frightening elements. At only eighty-four minutes long Hatching wastes no time in getting to the crutch of the story – the hatching of the egg, and the discovery of what is inside – reserving maximum opportunities for the darker elements to take hold. 

Inside Tinja’s egg hides Alli, a giant bird-like monstrosity, a creature Tinja is initially wary of. The young girl quickly changes her mind though after realising that Alli has imprinted on her and views her as its mother. Having been starved of maternal love and support for years, Tinja pours all the care and attention that she herself is craving into her “child”. This though is a horror film and so Alli isn’t as innocent as she appears. Alli is brought to the screen by Conor O’Sullivan and the creature-work is out of this world. Right from the epic hatching the viewer surrenders to the idea that it is a real living and breathing creature. Puppetry in films feels like a dying art and so seeing it displayed so wonderfully here offers hope that there’s still life in this artform yet. Much like the plot, as the film progresses and evolves, so does Alli, becoming something much more disturbing than in that striking first encounter. Working expertly alongside O’Sullivan’s creation is the incredible talent of Siiri Solalinna. Although still very young, the actor displays a grace and wisdom beyond her age and crafts a compelling and heartbreaking protagonist for this very peculiar story. 

Delicately constructed, Hatching is dazzling to behold. From its first image to its last, Hatching captures the audience’s imagination, transporting them to a world that seems to exist just outside of our own. There are acknowledgements that the story unfolds within a modern setting, but the visuals are so lush, and the characters so removed from general society, that the piece takes on an otherworldly and almost ethereal tone. The sensation is akin to watching an early era Burton, Edward Scissorhands being an especially close point of reference. Hatching takes on that fairy-tale persona to explore some dark and disturbing issues. Proof that scary doesn’t just come through the use of spooky looking houses and darkness, the pastel hues here will induce an equal amount of restless nights as it weaves a delicately balanced tale of horror. With a core story that straddles dysfunctional families, the drive for perfection alongside familiar fairytale beats, Hatching dazzles and disturbs in equal measure. 

Hatching

Kat Hughes

Hatching

Summary

Hatching dazzles with its visuals, disturbs with its content, and chills with it’s excellent creature work, weaving together a delicately balanced cotton-candy coated nightmare.

4

Hatching was reviewed at Sundance 2022. Hatching will arrive in cinemas and on VOD in the US from IFC Midnight on 29th April 2022. A UK release date is still to be confirmed.

Kat Hughes is a UK born film critic and interviewer who has a passion for horror films. An editor for THN, Kat is also a Rotten Tomatoes Approved Critic. She has bylines with Ghouls Magazine, Arrow Video, Film Stories, Certified Forgotten and FILMHOUNDS and has had essays published in home entertainment releases by Vinegar Syndrome and Second Sight. When not writing about horror, Kat hosts micro podcast Movies with Mummy along with her five-year-old daughter.

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