Hatching (2022)

directed by Hanna Bergholm

Finland

91 minutes

4 stars out of 5

----

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.