Rating: NR | Runtime: 91 minutes
Release Date: March 4th, 2022 (Finland) / April 29th, 2022 (USA)
Studio: Nordisk Film / IFC Midnight
Director(s): Hanna Bergholm
Writer(s): Ilja Rautsi / Hanna Bergholm (story)

I was hoping you could at least let me be happy.

Hanna Bergholm’s Hatching almost lost me at the end. What had been a captivating look at the psychological damage wrought by a narcissistic parent made flesh suddenly takes a turn wherein the real person at fault appeared to be getting away with their incessant abuse.

I thought Ilja Rautsi’s script (from Bergholm’s story) was falling prey to the same flawed logic so much Hollywood fare does as far as sympathizing with the aggressor simply because we’ve been culturally hardwired to excuse troubling parenting as the cost of doing business rather than an inexcusable form of violence (see Lady Bird for a recent example of the opposite). Thankfully, however, Bergholm and company know what they’re doing. They intentionally lead us towards that potential to deliver a punishment worse than I could have assumed.

Because this mother (Sophia Heikkilä) deserves punishment. There’s a difference between being a “woman who knows what she wants” and a cruelly vain monster terrorizing those who love her until they willingly take a subservient role to her whims. It goes beyond just pushing her young daughter Tinja (Siiri Solalinna) into a soul-crushing emotional prison because she wasn’t able to live out her own fantasies when she was her age.

It’s also posing her hollow shell of a husband (Jani Volanen) and spoiled brat of a son (Oiva Ollila) like dolls into a perfectly fabricated nuclear family for her online followers. And it’s about falling in love with a younger widower (Reino Nordin’s Tero) and forcing everyone to let her hijack his life too without facing any consequences since loving someone means letting them be happy—even at your own expense.

It’s no surprise then that Tinja would snap. The pressure of gymnastics. Keeping her mother’s affair secret. Always pretending to smile when she feels nothing but rage from constantly having her own desires silenced. Why not figuratively put all that pent-up hostility and torment into the raven egg she finds in the forest to watch it grow with the salt of her tears?

What hatches is a grotesque human-sized bird with unnatural characteristics that ensure we know exactly what’s happening next. Tethered psychically as two halves of one whole, it becomes difficult to know whether what we see is real or a metaphorical manifestation of split personalities: victim and protector vying to survive an onslaught of horror no child should ever have to bear as her parents continue to pretend nothing is amiss.

The creature effects are a lot of fun and the twists and turns as far as characters like Tero or Tinja’s new friend Reeta (Ida Määttänen) are concerned really keep the narrative fresh and ripe for graphic gore. They also allow Tinja’s all too familiar victimization to have points of comparison and contrast. To see Reeta’s pure joy is to know that Tinja’s happiness is simply a mirror unto her mother to avoid more punishment. And Tero’s genuine worry and attempts to listen to Tinja rather than dismiss shows everything her mother and father aren’t with little more than an empathetic look.

So, while the horror aspects are a nice touch to keep audiences interested in blood happy, Hatching’s true success is its authentic depiction of the sort of childhood trauma too many laugh off as growing pains instead of a destruction of innocence.

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Siiri Solalinna in HATCHING; courtesy of IFC Midnight.