Hatching (2022)

directed by Hanna Bergholm

Finland

91 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I found this when I was looking for something Finnish to watch for Kalevala Day earlier this year, but it hadn't been released yet, so I had to wait. I was looking forward to it, and then some blogs that I follow for posts about practical FX started posting gifs of it, and I was looking forward to it even more. I will probably cover spoilers below.

This is a movie that's full of a lot of metaphors but never once felt trite because of it. I think in certain places it could even have extended the metaphors further, because it did have room to be yet more directly vicious about specific things, but the restrained, symbolic nature of its criticisms is what makes it great. The "specific things" I'm talking about here are a very recent phenomenon: The utter lack of privacy that children are suffering in growing numbers due to being featured in YouTube "family vlogs". This is something I can't stand, and so to me, if Hatching had focused completely on it and devoted itself to utterly tearing this emerging trend down, it still wouldn't have been enough. I can't imagine spending your entire childhood being scrutinized not only by your parents for your likeability as a product but also by thousands if not millions of strangers on the internet. Like, welcome to your non-consensual acting career. But I digress. The main character in Hatching being the child of one such "influencer" mom is an integral part of this film, but there are other parts that make up the whole.

We start off almost immediately with maybe the film's most blunt visual metaphor. While filming an oh-so-casual, "look how happy we are!" romp around their immaculate house stocked with delicate, expensive decorations, a bird breaks through the family's window and trashes the place. This is pretty obviously an omen for the coming disruption to their perfect life that the family will soon face. It's also an omen for some absolutely fantastic practical effects. I noticed right away that they seemed to be using a real bird, not a CGI one, as much as possible, and a bit later when the bird is injured and the daughter sneaks outside to put it out of its misery, the puppet used for closeups while she's doing the act is just beautiful. I'm sure we're all used to that thing horror movies do where, when they need to show a dead animal, the puppet they use is basically no better than a stuffed toy you could buy at a kid's toy store. Not so here. I honestly forgot for a minute that I wasn't seeing a real injured bird.

After this we get both more visual metaphors and more beautiful practical effects. After Tinja has to kill the bird, she discovers an egg near it and decides to take it home and hide it in her bed to incubate it. It gets bigger and bigger and eventually hatches a bizarre, birdlike creature, wet and stinking, awkward and ugly to behold. But it's hers. It's a physical representation of her pent-up secrets and loathing that were born from being forced into both a strenuous gymnastics career for her mother to live vicariously through and a 24/7 public persona for her vlog, and it's hers. This felt so real, because this is what living with a strict, perfectionist parent will do to a child: They start accumulating traits that, while not even necessarily negative, do not conform to their parent's expectations, but they do so in secret, so that eventually there's an entire other self that they've created and need to hide. As Tinja's bird matures it becomes harder and harder for her to hide it, and it also becomes more of a twin to her. Crucially - and this is the biggest spoiler I'll talk about here - at the end of the film, Tinja's mother destroys any opportunity to reconcile with the daughter or undo the damage she'd done, and instead is left with the bundle of secrets and lies that she forced her to become.

You really do feel for Tinja all throughout the film. Nobody pays any attention to her unless she's giving them what they want (or not). The only time her mother is interested in her is when she's trying to force her into being a perfect little clone of the star gymnast she used to be until an implied accident cut short her career. We even see how her mother is starting to push her aside in favor of her affair partner (arguably the sanest and most normal guy in the whole movie) and his shiny new baby girl. Given the film's bird motif, this almost feels like a cuckoo situation, but in reverse - the nestbuilder being the one to shove her own children out of the nest to get satisfaction from a newer, better family.

There's also one repeated visual metaphor that I found really intriguing but couldn't entirely figure out: The characters keep getting their blood on one another. The most obvious example is when the mother comes home after losing it in the car and bloodying her nose by smashing her face against the steering wheel in frustration, and leaves a little of her blood on her husband's face by kissing him. But there's another scene that goes entirely unexplained, where Tinja's younger brother hugs their mom and gets a little blood from his shirt onto hers. To me, this felt like it was a reflection of what the mother was doing by constantly capturing her family on film - marking them, doing something physical to say "you're mine, you're my blood, you are of me and I get to decide who you are". If we want to get really pretentious with it, I could even say that the part where the mother's boy toy shows Tinja that it's okay to loosen up a little by flinging a spoonful of baby food across the table is the opposite of the blood thing: Instead of being treated as an intrusion, an animalistic marking of territory, the spilling of fluid (in this case food) is done casually and without ulterior motive or consequence.

The bird-creature is portrayed with a pitch-perfect blend of practical effects and I believe just a little bit of CGI, highlighting the way that CGI should be used when incorporated into creature design. It should enhance and compliment a physical framework instead of overtaking it or being used instead of it. The creature is remarkably corporeal, and the way Tinja's actress interacts with it made me completely able to believe it as a living being. The puppetry behind it has to be commended as well, because while a lot of its jerky movements were in fact integral to it as a gawky newborn bird-thing, it all looked deliberate, not like the creature had limited range of motion due to difficulty operating it.

I could probably watch this several more times and still come out with more to say about it. It really is an interesting and new film that has the added bonus of some wonderful effects and cinematography. Hanna Bergholm doesn't seem to have directed anything really of her own yet, mostly doing children's dramas and shorts from what I can tell, so Hatching is very exciting and marks her as a director to watch.

Stanleyville (2021)

directed by Maxwell McCabe-Lokos

Canada

88 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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I'm absolutely psyched to be reviewing this, as it's been one of my most anticipated films for probably a year or more, and finally getting to see it was very exciting. However - and I mean this in the best way - I can't see any way to talk about this movie other than by describing all the ways in which it was nothing like what I expected it to be.

I was under the impression that this was going to be a pretty straightforward, semi-dystopian workplace dramedy of the type that has been popular as of late due to everybody generally feeling like we're being forced to work desk jobs during the apocalypse. The book Severance, the TV show Severance (no relation), the film Mayhem, and even back a few years the more popular (yet less watchable) Horrible Bosses all encompass this sentiment of getting out your pent-up frustration with your job in weird ways - either that or they present a version of capitalism that is as bizarre as the reality of it is, but in different ways. This is where I thought Stanleyville was heading. Instead, I do not know what this movie is doing or trying to say, and I love that for it. Some synopses call it a "satire", but that word is too small to contain the whole of this film. I also feel like the word "satire" implies a kind of malicious disparagement, and while this movie definitely is saying something about our tired old work routine and how it needs to be abolished, to me, at least, it didn't feel like it was overtly angry about that. I think maybe this is more about lampooning the concept of work than the workplace.

The main character is by far the most fascinating aspect of this film and is in large part the reason why the whole thing feels so unique and unpredictable. She begins the film the way I expected her to: Leaving a dismal-looking office job and an unsatisfying home life to go on a spur-of-the-moment adventure. She's lured into what sounds like an unusual game show that would offer her the opportunity to test her mettle against other people from all walks of life. That was all fairly normal. But there are things about her that make her wildly different from the way protagonists usually are in the kind of capitalism-escape-fantasy film that I thought this would be. Usually there's a degree of relatability; you can place yourself in the shoes of the main character who is running from their boring job or beating up their boss or whatever the situation is. But Maria, Stanleyville's protagonist, only gets more opaque as the film goes on. She doesn't speak much, certainly not about her situation or her feelings towards her job. She's not the most relatable of the cast of characters she finds herself mixed in with - that title would probably go to Felicie (if it goes to any of them), who just really wants a car and hates everybody else. And Felicie doesn't even get that much screentime. Maria is something entirely new. Having a protagonist like her who seems to have come from a totally different film and is equipped with powers that never get fully explained makes Stanleyville impossible to pin down and tough to relate to - which is good, in this case.

This is one of those projects that you can kind of intimate are only scratching the surface of a much vaster idea that the filmmaker had in mind. Sometimes you watch a movie and you just get the idea that whoever made it knows much, much more about it than you do - not in the technical sense, where you're aware of the cast of people physically making the film (by operating the camera, the mics, the props, et cetera), but in the sense that everything that happens feels like it's part of a bigger mythos that you are not privy to the details of. I say this partially because the director's previous short films seem to be tied into this one somehow but also because the aesthetic of Stanleyville is so specific and so well-fleshed-out that it feels like there's so much more to it than what's on the surface.

It's hard to describe how something looks to someone who hasn't seen it, especially something as arty as this. And especially something as specific as this. Nothing else looks like this movie does - it uses a conglomeration of individual objects to make up a single-location film that feels like a huge game of I Spy that you're playing with one eye closed. You pick out recurring themes and things scattered throughout the room but you never know what they mean, yet they do seem to have enormous significance that you can't grasp. The bust with the pith helmet, the big sea shell, the cans of corn, why is there writing in Amharic on the wall? We never find out what the Amharic means (unless you are literate in Amharic). My favorite blink-and-you-miss-it detail is that all the items in the storage room seem to be labeled in different languages - it adds to the feeling of deep weirdness and disorientation in time and space that the whole film cultivates. It's almost like this takes place in an alternate universe.

I really can't contain anything about this movie in words, and I certainly can't pigeonhole it by simply saying that it's strange and new. I'm not gawking at its weirdness or taking exception to it, I'm appreciating and enjoying it for what it is. I think I'm rating it on the higher side of most reviews I've seen, but I don't know, something about this just did it for me. I very seldom have a film escape both my expectations and my ability to judge what's going to happen next in so thorough a manner and so enjoyable of one. Try not to go into this pre-judging it, and if you can, it's probably best to not judge it even while you're watching it - this is a weird maze of a movie (especially for something that takes place largely in a single room) that works better if you just vibe with it instead of applying labels to it.

Rebirth of Mothra III (1998)

directed by Okihiro Yoneda

Japan

99 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Wow, okay. I can't say I expected the third one to be the best of this trilogy, but to me this felt like it took care of almost everything I wished the previous two had. Maybe I was just a little more awake and alert this time. I think this genuinely is the best of them, though.

I was initially a little afraid going into this because of the time travel plot - anybody who's seen Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah will know that when Toho tries to deal with time travel, it can quickly turn into a convoluted mess. (For anyone who hasn't seen it... I really can't explain it to you because I don't fully understand it myself.) But therein lies the rub: very little in this movie is explained with any real depth, and as such, instead of becoming a headache-inducing tangle of threads you can barely follow, the time travel plot is as simple as "If Mothra goes back in time to kill King Ghidorah when he was a baby then the King Ghidorah that exists in the present will die". I think most people can grasp that one. Killing someone in the past to kill them in the future is kind of Time Travel 101. Exactly how or why Mothra is able to time travel is never elaborated upon, but doesn't really need to be - is there anything we'd be surprised to see her do at this point?

(I wish English had a neuter pronoun to refer to things that are not human, because "they" doesn't feel right for Mothra but neither does "it". We're going to refer to the concept of Mothra in general with she/her pronouns and the specific Mothra in this film with he/him pronouns, at least for the moment. It really, really, really doesn't matter, though.)

The pacing is drastically better here compared to the previous two films and it feels like this one actually has a plot. The battles are neither constant nor restricted to the finale, but spread out into skirmishes where one party usually needs to regroup after suffering grievous injury. Despite still being incredibly powerful (we'll get to that in a second), Mothra does take a beating - in almost all of her film appearances, but especially as Leo here. He gets chunks ripped out of his wings and is burnt almost to a crisp, but he never gives up. This is another big point in the film that remains unexplained because there's just no real way to explain it without detracting from it: How Mothra can continually get beaten almost to death, but revive every single time with nothing more than healing songs and dances from the Elias sisters (we'll get to that in a second too). The more sporadic battles followed by brief retreats for each party to hone their skills reminded me of some stuff that goes on in Ultraman, where a frequent theme is an Ultra having to pause to learn a new technique before they can go on fighting. It might be done simply as a way to fill time, but the actual progression of skills, rather than having a hero instantly know everything about how to fight from the get-go, makes for a more believable experience. That Mothra occasionally needs a minute to adapt to her circumstances only makes her feel more powerful and adept.

Another thing that this movie does that I was waiting for the previous two to do is address the Elias' more sinister older sister, Belvera, who spent the last two films glomming on to whatever nasty thing got woken up and tried to take over the Earth. She's tired of being evil in this one, and re-joins... if not the good side, then at least the side her sisters are on. The film does not treat her as an irredeemable villain or make it so that she has to change completely in order to be a character who fights to save the planet - in fact, her darker personality is presented as something crucial to the strength of the alliance between the three sisters. She herself says that their combined powers have to include rage and hatred, that they have to be able to harness her negative feelings to create a bond that is ultimately stronger for including her perspective. I did not expect her to be treated as such a faceted character who wasn't just there as a foil for Moll and Lora's good deeds.

Real quick I wanna talk about the work in making the sisters look realistically tiny, because while the CGI is still pretty dodgy, they do dedicate some serious time and attention to that part. One extremely small detail I caught and that I love is that Belvera's dress seems to have a zipper on the back - a human-sized zipper, and from some very quick visual math it looks like it's in scale. As in, assuming a zipper is the equivalent of maybe a little less than a foot in Elias terms, the zipper's size makes sense when you take into account how tall Belvera is supposed to be.

Mothra Leo is at the top of his game here. Besides looking absolutely beautiful in many new and colorful forms that debut for the first time, he takes on King Ghidorah - here envisioned as a 130-million-year-old menace that killed the dinosaurs (don't worry about it) - and physically picks him up at one point. Ghidorah canonically weighs 25,000 metric tons even in his younger form, and Mothra weighs somewhere between 3,500 and 5,900 metric tons. This establishes that Leo is a competent fighter in that he doesn't rely solely on his formidable beam attacks but also on sheer physical strength when it would suit the situation better.

I'll finish this unnecessarily long review by talking about how much I love the relationship between Mothra and her/his devotees, even though (and in fact, because) it's a little silly. Again, it's never explained because it's so far from being grounded in reality that there's no good logic to apply to it, but I genuinely enjoy the sense of a spiritual framework that exists around the Elias and Mothra. I love that singing the Mothra song and doing a little dance can provide Mothra with a power-up no matter how far apart both parties are from each other, or how beaten-down Mothra is. I love that it doesn't have to be hard to be back-up for Mothra, that the Elias don't have to go questing or recover some sacred object but are instead inherently imbued with the power to communicate with and heal Mothra through prayer and song. As silly as it is, I think this kind of captures something about the relationship between a god and their worshippers that Western Christianity often ignores: Devotion does not have to be hard, you do not necessarily have to suffer for it, but you have to keep doing it. You have to pray for Mothra every single time she needs you, and although it may not physically cost you to do so, it has to be constant, and you have to be unwavering, and you have to be there no matter what, because there is no alternative.

Rebirth of Mothra II (1997)

directed by Kunio Miyoshi

Japan

97 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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Unfortunately I was pretty asleep during this one, so I'm not going to talk about it with much depth and insight (do I ever?), but I still want to get some general thoughts about it down. Not the fault of the movie itself, I just fall asleep during movies a lot.

Where Rebirth of Mothra dealt with deforestation, II deals with the pollution of the ocean. I don't think there was any one sinister megacorp blamed this time, like how the logging industry was clearly under fire in the last film; humanity as a whole is framed as responsible for all the trash in the sea. The film is set in an Okinawan resort town that's supposed to be comparatively untouched and serene, but even they face the encroachment of careless tourists and plastic waste invading their waters. I didn't particularly like the heavy emphasis on Okinawan myth and spirituality here, especially not when mixed with stuff invented out of whole cloth, because to me it basically felt like the equivalent of when American movies use Indigenous spirituality as an aesthetic. But maybe there was actual research and consultation with real people done here - I don't know. The Okinawan motif doesn't seem to go much further than a bare surface level as a sort of woo-woo magic, but I'm not too familiar with these things.

If you were irritated by the kids in the first movie, I've got some bad news: most everyone in this is also a child. I don't know where their parents were, this time - certainly not as involved in their welfare as the last one. The main character here is much more reserved and mature than the two siblings before, and I felt like she carried the film impressively although she was flanked by two goof-offs who were her one-time bullies, as well as two thieving adults who weren't much better. The whole movie has a really heavy "for kids" vibe, and I haven't addressed that with regards to either the previous film or this one yet, because I just don't feel like it's something I need to bring up. These pretty much are children's movies, I'm not going to watch a children's movie and complain that it's too juvenile for me. But I do want to bring it up now because this is an example of children's media where real effort was put into it, which to me seems like a no-brainer - kids aren't stupid, they know when they're being pandered to or given the scraps no adult wants because adults think they won't care. But there's a cottage industry dedicated to churning out literal nonsense to glue kids' eyes to iPad screens and suck out ad money from them (see Elsagate), so when a movie like this is made with care and attention to detail and marketed towards kids, it unfortunately can feel like an exception rather than the rule.

Mothra's baby, referred to as Mothra Leo, is grown up and takes center stage in this one. For reasons unknown to me he is generally regarded as being male. One of my favorite things to point out to people is that Mothra is one of the most powerful kaiju in the Godzilla canon, and Leo takes after his mother (yes, yes, the Godzilla Mothra and this one are different, I'm just saying) in that at times he feels ridiculously overpowered. But we love him for it. He has a host of different beam attacks as well as some dexterity with his claws, and crucially he gains the ability to fight underwater - a major weak spot for the Mothra of the previous film. It's probably because I was loopy-tired during this, but I couldn't stop thinking about the significance of Leo learning to swim and fight underwater after having witnessed the drowning death of his mother. I mean, were they replaced by humans, this would be immediately recognized as a triumphant moment of character development: The child overcoming the thing that they watched kill their parent, not being held back by fear but instead honoring their parent's memory to become even stronger than them. 

I just love how Mothra is so cyclical, like many things in nature. One Mothra may die in the midst of battle but another one always takes up the mantle. This is exactly why Mothra is so unbeatable. She's less a single character, like most of her opponents are, and more an ongoing phenomenon. It's like trying to fight the spirit of renewal and rebirth itself. You just can't.

Pacing-wise, this is more what I expect from a kaiju film; the battle scenes don't feel like they take up as much time and we're expected to care about the human characters running around an undersea castle with some relics or whatever. I liked this aesthetically; the CGI is sort of middle-tier for its time and doesn't hold up very well at all, but there's a kind of vintage-computer-game sensibility to seeing everybody roam the obviously green-screened halls of a mystical, geometrically complex ancient ruin. I think possibly the battles were restricted a little more this time because of how powerful Mothra Leo is - he could have beat Dagahra (who I found almost wholly uninteresting, despite the nice suit design) in a single scene, but things needed to be spread out over the whole movie.

This definitely wasn't as good as the first one, but it is fun. You really have to turn your brain off for a lot of it. The ecological message is about as heavy-handed as you can get but I don't tend to view that as a bad thing. There's plenty of glorious puppetry and moth stuff for moth fans. I can't complain too much. It's just good, not quite great.

Rebirth of Mothra (1996)

directed by Okihiro Yoneda

Japan

104 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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A lot of people might not know that there was an entirely Mothra-centric trilogy of films released in the mid-1990s. Despite Mothra's popularity stateside, none of these films has ever gotten a wide release with subtitles. This is still very surprising to me, considering that there were still Godzilla films being produced to commercial success that did eventually end up being exported. 

This first entry into the trilogy expands upon Mothra's status as an environmental protector. The main characters - who are two very young children, so if kids in film annoy you, you may have a worse time with this than I did - have a father working in the logging industry, and while he's not as greedy and careless as his bosses up top, he doesn't exactly do anything to get out of the business or halt the destruction of pristine forests, either. I only realized later that he was the catalyst for the entire plot, because it really feels like this one guy as an individual doesn't have much to do with anything. Even though he was only one cog in the deforestation machine, it was him who prised up the seal keeping Desghidorah asleep, and triggered the immense destruction to follow. Even then, though, most of the story was controlled by external actors; an evil little lady bent on taming Desghidorah and using him to her own ends was watching in the wings and manipulating things the whole time. Humans are incidental to this, being used simply as a means to an end and then left to flounder in the ensuing chaos.

There's no better way I can describe this movie other than to say that if you are a Mothra fan this will be your jam. It introduces many new characters and concepts and explores the ones we already know. The Shobijin get yet another name change, being called collectively "Elias" in this trilogy, and they're implied in this first film to not be two unusually tiny people living on an island where everyone else is average-sized, but a whole race of that size. The three of them that we see are sisters: the good two standing in for the twins we all know and love, and one bad apple who, like I said, wants Desghidorah for her own purposes. It's also established that in the past there were many, many Mothras - that the Mothra who the Elias have communed with for years is now old, and not well; her time to die coming soon, she's lain an egg and is resting on the verge of death, but still ready to come to the rescue should an innocent planet under fire need her help.

It goes without saying that the kaiju designs are amazing here, as they always are. The big Mothra is a bit cuter than we're used to, less "buggy", with fluffier legs and brighter colors. The good two Elias sisters have a flying steed referred to as Fairy Mothra who is a much smaller but similarly adorable baby Mothra. And we even get to see an entirely new generation of Mothra that we've never seen before, opening up the truly exciting possibility of other members of Mothra's species who bear only a passing resemblance to her, with all the variation that real-life moths have between individuals. This is basically a moth party, but Desghidorah (who, if you haven't figured it out, is an updated King Ghidorah) looks good too. I was disappointed that he dropped his iconic bidibidibidibidibidi in this film, but I still like him, and the more "terrestrial", reptilian look makes him into almost a different monster than the dragonlike King Ghidorah.

And I just want to talk for a second about how much I love the fact that the Mothra larvae are a central player in both this and other kaiju films. The design of the larvae does not for a second shy away from the fact that this is a grub - a brown, slimy, writhing grub, with no classically endearing characteristics, who can't locomote other than by inching its way across the ground. This time they even add squelchy sound effects whenever it moves. And yet it is not made fun of or kept on the sidelines but is a vital force in almost every fight it enters. I honestly cannot think of any other movie in which a grub would be allowed to be heroic like this. It's never cast in a comedic light, Mothra's baby is as much of a savior as Mothra is, even when it's in wriggling grub form.

The pacing of this film is drastically different from what I'm used to in my Godzilla movies and I was not prepared for it at all. I'm used to anywhere from 70 to 100 minutes of humans faffing around until Godzilla shows up for a handful of moments, and the big battle being reserved until the very end, sometimes with a quick skirmish at the beginning before everyone goes back to their hideouts to await the final fight. This movie is the final fight. Like, the whole thing. There's a little silliness at the beginning where the Elias and their respective mounts completely trash the main characters' house and freak out their mom, but then Desghidorah wakes up and I'd say a solid 80% if not more of this whole film takes place while Mothra and her baby are fighting to stop him destroying the world. I say "the world", but in another contrast to your typical kaiju film, Desghidorah never leaves the forest reserve where he finishes off the deforestation that humans started. He never quite stomps his way into a city. He would have certainly done so if not stopped, but all we see of him is him rampaging around a forest. It's weird, a little, but again, this is a movie about the destruction of the natural world by humans, who trigger a series of events that inevitably ends with a runaway chain of continuing climate change and animal death. The stories of humans who might see their own lives complicated by Desghidorah is for another time.

I personally liked the way most of this film was taken up by action scenes. It may get tiring, but I guess it was such a change from what I typically see in kaiju media that I found it novel in this case. The human drama feels obligatory and somewhat forced, but the lore behind Mothra and her devotees is fresh and interesting when it gets squeezed in here and there. I am very interested in seeing where this series goes next especially if it moves into new territory other than having Mothra face Desghidorah.