You don’t have to speak Finnish to find out what kind of social media presence the influential people at the heart of director Hannah Bergholm Hatching’s psychological physical horror have created for themselves. It’s blond, blue-eyed, and focused on executing the “tradition” in a way that makes you wonder what their whole deal is – especially when the ring lights are off and the cameras are away. Hatching is happy to share with you his ideas on what makes these types of personalities tick and how life for the number of followers is deeply unhealthy. But the film does so with the explicit intention of leaving you worried about how horrible it is to portray dysfunction.
Hatching tells the story of Tinya (Siiri Solalina), a 12-year-old gymnast who works as hard as her unnamed mother (Sofia Heikila) to make sure their family’s channel with many edited “candid” home videos is successful. Although Tinja is not the best gymnast at her local club, she strives to keep up with her peers largely because her presence on the team is an important aspect of the way she presents herself online.
Tinja’s hyperactive brother, Matthias (Oiva Olila) and their unnamed guitar enthusiast father (Jani Volanen) are also featured in the household’s live broadcasts, where they broadcast to each other as well-behaved members of a nuclear family. But Hatching clarifies that the channel, like most everything else in their lives, is the domain of Tina’s mother, a woman who regularly broadcasts almost everything about their daily lives to hide how deeply unhappy she is. Although the captivated audience is all Tina’s mother thinks she wants, what she fails to understand is how she always had this in her daughter, and her inability to see this reality is much of what drives her. Hatching.
Since everything about Tina’s family is a little different from the time Hatching first introduced them, it’s almost natural that one afternoon a big crow suddenly invades their lives in a whirlwind of croaking and feathers. As everyone except Tinya panics, you can see how the arrival of the bird is something like a truly accidental event that a content-obsessed like Tinya’s mother may, under various circumstances, recognize as something worth sharing with her followers. But instead of pulling out her phone or helping her daughter release the bird after Tina catches it, Tina’s mother clicks on the animal’s neck with a precision that Hatching is careful to emphasize.
Hatching is not so much for Tina’s mother as for how, after a lifetime of learning from a woman and obediently playing the role of an obedient daughter, Tina cannot help but feel suffocated by the lies that define her loved ones. Tina cannot admit that the death of the bird bothers her, because she knows that this would be tantamount to her mother’s contradiction. This is the reason why Tina does not tell anyone when the supposedly dead crow starts calling her from the forest and why she hides the strange egg she finds while looking for the bird.
In the same way that Tina can’t share her feelings with her family, she can’t see how weird it is when she starts to put the egg in a teddy bear, taking it out only when she needs to calm down, comforting then. What she can clearly see, however, is how fast the egg begins to grow once it begins to open up to it, and it doesn’t take long before cracks begin to form in the thick spotted shell of the thing.
Discovering Hatching’s monster is equally nasty and terrifying and best experienced with as little spoilage as possible. What makes this particular scene and the role the creature plays in Hatching’s story work so well, however, is Solalin’s haunting and subtle portrayal of a girl so accustomed to sublimating her feelings that meeting a monster face to face is something like waking call. The thing that hatches from Hatching’s egg is grotesque and often difficult to watch, but more importantly, it’s real, like nothing else in Tina’s life, and she can’t help but feel enlivened by his presence.
When Hatching focuses solely on Tina and her new boyfriend, the film almost plays as a grim tribute to Mamoru Hosoda’s Digimon Adventure and other child-friendly franchises for young people that connect with magical creatures that jump out of eggs ready for battle. . There is softness and vulnerability between Tina and the creature, which speaks to how desperately the characters need each other and how expertly Hatching’s puppet team managed to revive the practical monster.
By allowing you to take a good look at the creature in the beginning, Hatching is released to become much more sophisticated, as it depicts the evolution of the monster and the growing habit of escaping to kill whatever it wants. With the approach of Tina and the monster, the shots of the cameraman Jarkko Laine become more and more striking and experimental, creating a disorienting and dream-like atmosphere that seems to be a continuation of the minds of the central characters. The hatching underscores this dreaminess with sobering reminders of how devastating Tina’s life was before the monster.
You can more or less see the form that will eventually take the last act of the film. But that doesn’t stop Hatching from succeeding, because it’s not a movie that has much interest in surprising you – its horror relies on being held back in the most terrifying moments, showing you every terrifying detail.
Hatching also stars Raynaud Nordin, Saia Lentonen and Ida Miaattanen. The film hits theaters on April 29.
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