Hatching opens on a montage of home videos captured via selfie stick. There’s daughter Tinja (Siiri Solalinna) practising her gymnastics and tickling her dad (Jani Volanen), the whole family sat smiling on a sofa. It’s part of a video for Mother’s (Sophia Heikkilä) blog, ‘Lovely Everyday Life’. Sadly, despite this family’s glossy façade, there is a darkness lurking underneath that will soon destroy them from the inside.
Director Hanna Bergholm’s Finnish feature debut is a tense, grotesque, weirdly touching addition to the canon of monstrous coming-of-age movies. Tinja is a beautiful young gymnast (a sporty setting that is ripe for rich stories about dedication and perfectionism) who idolises her mum, and is doing her very best to make her proud in an upcoming competition. Clearly struggling to keep it together in a home that values appearances over genuine affection, she becomes attached to the giant egg ballooning in size in her bedroom — and to the bloody, bird-like creature that eventually breaks free from it.
This is a metaphor for the animalistic struggle of adolescence.
To say any more about The Thing That Hatches would be to give too much away, but the way Bergholm’s story (and Ilja Rautsi’s script) develops Tinja’s relationship with it is fascinating; it’s at once a mirror of the most primal parts of herself and a reflection of the brutal, self-sacrificial requirements of motherhood. This is a metaphor for the animalistic struggle of adolescence — think Turning Red, but swap the cute panda for an avian nightmare, and the desire to go to a pop concert for something far more murderous.
Solalinna is wondrous; a highly graceful screen presence, she manages to balance Tinja’s anxieties and striving for approval with a steely sensibility, and really excels at some Ringu-esque contortionist movement in the latter half of the film. Bergholm’s direction is gripping, picking the perfect moments to hold back and let rip, and Hatching’s overall mood is deliciously unsettling from the start, boosted throughout by body horror, floral fever-dream production design and strange, The-Shining-twins-like similarities between the core family members. Most impressive, and the thing that cuts through all the weirdness? This is a horror film with heart.