Hatching Review: A Monster Metaphor in Search of Equally Monstrous Movie Madness

Beneath the prestige-horror trappings of Hanna Bergholm’s incredibly uneven debut feature, Hatching, lies a grungy little creature feature yearning to break free. The film turns on a conceit that’s laden with gonzo-horror potential: One night, a guilt-ridden 12-year-old girl, Tinja (Siiri Solalinna), takes home a bird’s egg that she finds in the woods, keeping it safe in her bed, where it grows larger and larger until it hatches into a skeletal humanoid bird that does violence on behalf of the girl’s subconscious will.

As a work of animatronics, the monster is gruesomely effective. Its mangled body and talons suggest its ferociousness, while its big, expressive eyes speak to an inner pain. In some of its grosser moments, such as when Tinja, like a mother bird, feeds the creature by regurgitating into its mouth, Hatching seems as if it may give in fully to its midnight-movie impulses.

If the concept sounds like a monster-movie riff on George Romero’s Monkey Shines, that’s exactly how the film plays in its more absorbing passages, with the gangly monstrosity snapping off the head of the neighbor’s dog in an act of vengeance and latter attempting to off Tinja’s obnoxious little brother, Matias (Oiva Ollila). Bergholm even replicates that film’s signature POV shots, which place us into the speedily prowling perspective of a killer beast.

However, like so much contemporary horror, Hatching is less interested in its bestial antagonist as a monster than as a metaphor. As the film makes abundantly clear, the ever-growing egg and the repulsive brute that hatches from within it are representations of Tinja’s anxieties, her feelings of inadequacy, and her submerged rage at her overbearing, perfectionist mother (Sophia Heikkilä), who’s identified in the credits simply as Mother.

Blond, skinny, and always impeccably accoutred Mother hosts a video blog entitled Lovely Everyday Life about “how lovely life can be.” She may present an air of flawless unflappability to her social media followers, but at home the woman shamelessly cuckolds her husband (Jani Volanen), who’s credited only as Father, and pressures Tinja into excelling at gymnastics, a sport that the girl doesn’t seem to especially enjoy, if she ever did in the first place.

Ilja Rautsi’s screenplay makes it impossible to miss the allegorical significance of the avian creature as it slowly morphs into Tinja’s double and becomes indistinguishable from the “real” girl. By suppressing the darker things in life, the filmmakers argue, we allow them to overtake us. Bergholm and Rautsi so heavily concentrated on working out the exact contours of their central allegory that they neglected to bring a similar level of attention to the rest of the film. Outside of the wonderfully creepy creature at its center, Hatching often has a slightly chintzy feel, with a reliance on overused devices and tricks, including creepy masks, shadowy lamp-based lighting, and fog effects, to create an ominous but canned atmosphere.

Other than Tinja, the characters in the film are mostly crudely drawn caricatures: Father is a wimpy cuck, Matias is a sniveling tattletale, and Mother is such a hyperbolic depiction of overbearing matriarchs that Hatching begins to flirt with the misogynistic Freudian notion that all our psychological ills can be traced back to our moms. Perhaps the filmmakers only intended to satirize a certain brand of oppressively image-obsessed motherdom here, but the film’s ham-handed allegorical construction, as well as its generically titled characters and self-serious tone in its final third, effectively drains the story of any of the specificity that might have resulted in a more incisive and brutal critique of the perils of perfectionism.