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.

The Witch (1952)

directed by Roland af Hällström

Finland

74 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

----

I watched this for Kalevala Day/Finnish Culture Day, which it is not anymore by the time you're reading this, and I'd been searching high and low for it for a long time, because anything that involves someone or something being buried in a bog is an instant watch for me. Some recognize this as Finland's first horror film, but as far as I know that honor belongs to Noidan kirot from 1927, although that one seems to be so scarce as to nearly be a lost film. This movie gets overshadowed by The White Reindeer, another horror film released in the same year, which is also quite good and I recommend it highly as well.

The film begins with a bit of a clash of views between the local farmers on whose land is the bog where the titular witch is "dug up" and the researchers who are searching the bog for archaeological finds. It's a typical situation that comes up in nearly every horror movie involving something being unearthed: The locals know there to be a legend surrounding the area that spawns whatever artifact or entity will later end up plaguing the film, and they wish the city folk would go back to where they came from instead of messing with forces beyond their control. The body of a young woman is uncovered from the bog, and the village's long collective memory immediately recognizes it as substantiating the legend of a witch who was murdered and thrown into the bog 300 years ago. As soon as the body is uncovered, things begin to go awry in the village, but it only gets worse when, in place of the corpse, the very alive body of a nude young woman is found.

There's some severely weird gender politics going on in this film. The arrival of the seemingly undead witch causes every man in town to go a little nuts - not in some primeval, mind-control way (the witch doesn't seem to have that much influence), but she signifies something that frustrates them on a deep level. "All women are witches", they say - in fact they say this over and over, many times. Every man teases his brothers and friends that every woman he's sweet on is a witch. All women are witches. It's posturing to cover up the fact that they're clearly afraid of what the witch represents. She's something they thought they killed, a force they tamped down and then built their identity upon the banishing of. If the witch is back, if the woman we forced into the earth when she tried to defy us is back, who are we as men? The women say that the witch was not really a witch, but a young girl who dared to resist when a local baron demanded a night with her as per tradition; in resisting she became a witch, not for having magic powers but for being the kind of woman who couldn't be suppressed. And the women are solidly afraid of her - they know what the presence of one defiant woman can mean for the rest of them, who will pay the price once the men suspect that they might not have total control over women like they imagined they did.

Mirja Mane plays the witch role with reckless abandon, and she plays it, again, not like a fairytale witch with magic powers, but as a woman who would have been scorned and branded an outcast for her unashamed behavior. She dances naked in the streets, doesn't chain herself to one man, and flaunts her sexuality openly. But when she's first unearthed, she's nothing like this - she's terrified, borderline incoherent; any time anybody suggests she might be the 300-year-old witch come back from the dead, she physically reacts as if someone slapped her. It's only with time that she becomes the impish, cackling, free-willed terror running roughshod over the town's rigid menfolk.

There is some ambiguity that the film seems to be pushing about whether or not she's actually the witch of legend, and this is the only thing I disliked about it. The ending felt weak and too soft for a film as bold as this one. Spoilers for a 70-year-old film: She basically comes to her senses and realizes that she was just a normal girl who - silly old me! - tripped and fell into the bog hole, never mind that we literally see her do things like disappear into thin air and that nobody acknowledges whether or not the unearthed skeleton was just laying there beneath her the whole time, as it would have been had she really just fell into the bog. I guess the point was that she became whatever the people of the town were afraid of her becoming, that at first she was a blank slate with no opinion of herself, but once people started to fear her, she became what they feared and worse. In the end, as is so often the case, the single person who is the object of an entire community's fear isn't the villain - the community is.

The Witch has a kind of dynamic energy that fits it as one of only a few horror movies coming from a country whose film industry was still relatively young. It doesn't feel stiff or restrained the way so many '50s horror films from the West do. The characters are not afraid to speak their minds and be loud and authentic - not rude, but with the shackles of performativity removed. I'm thinking of the woman, who's only in one scene, that they bring in because they get the idea that maybe the bog witch is this lady's daughter. She takes one look at her and basically goes "Nope, she's not mine, you think I don't know the people I've made?" and then demands compensation for being made to walk a long way on her elderly, aching legs. She's not treated as the butt of a joke, as some caricature of a tough old broad, she's just there for her one scene and exists as something outside the bounds of gender roles, much like the witch herself. Even though it tapers down to a somewhat disappointing ending, this movie is a joy to watch. As an aside, it seems to me like a lot of Finns have a very negative opinion of their country's film industry - I'd like to know what, if any, modern Finnish movies are generally well-regarded among the public.

Shopping Tour (2012)

directed by Mikhail Brashinsky

Russia, Finland

70 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

----

This is a really good movie that for some reason I had never paid any attention to until last night. I think it's because I would see that poster of a little girl with blood smeared around her mouth and the ugly font and go "ugh, another zombie movie". If only I knew before how wrong that was. It's best to go into this blind, though, so beware.

So the main characters are a boy in his early teens and his mom taking a shopping trip to Finland along with a bus full of other Russian tourists. The relationship between the two of them is very strained due to the implied recent death of the boy's father, and the overall fact of how hard it is to be a teen and the parent of a teen. Once they get to Finland they end up in the middle of a nationwide celebration of cannibalism and violence in a hyper-real version of every international traveler's nightmare scenario: You go through the draconian ordeal of border crossing and then suddenly no one will help you and everyone is antagonistic, except now it's worse because they also want to eat you.

I suppose this could also be unpopular because it's found-footage, a subgenre which still invites knee-jerk negativity amongst a lot of viewers. Most of the footage is supposed to have been filmed on the boy's camera phone, although they do use some cuts and fade(s)-to-black that betray the "purity" of the found-footage aesthetic. But this movie has a unique perspective. I can't think offhand of any other movies intended for adults where the main characters are a teen and his mom. You would think it would get annoying quickly and not be suitable fodder for an entire film, but Shopping Tour goes all in on this concept and is essentially a character study of the two before it introduces its main premise. There's something deeply genuine about the way they're depicted constantly bickering, constantly thinking the other one is wrong and they're right, that they know more than each other. It's a realistic and realistically flawed relationship where you can tell that it's two people who love each other but are currently inhabiting the worst period of each other's life. This isn't the kind of relationship you typically see depicted on film, and if you do, it usually doesn't introduce cannibals at any point.

Once the whole cannibal thing started getting going, this started to feel much more like A Movie™. I was hoping the stark realism would carry over into that part of the film and we would get some uniquely harrowing scenes handled with the same degree of naked tragedy and emotion as the rest of it, but all in all it's not that original. Which is fine, I still had fun. It's original enough that the parts where it dials it in don't matter as much. When the first person dies there's no solid divide between that moment and the rest of the movie, and I thought that was really great- no build-up, no prior warning, and the format prevents it from using any overwrought musical sting. You just see somebody get brutally killed all of a sudden and then all hell breaks loose. The sound design leaves something to be desired big time (there is a Wilhelm scream) but aesthetically the violence was on point.

The first death also signals a really sharp turn into comedy that did clash a little with its previous seriousness, but somehow it works well. This is all super blatant anti-Finnish propaganda but it is honestly very funny, and I'm hoping it's all in jest, as a person with Finnish ancestry. I mean, it purports that every Finn is some kind of cannibal pagan who practices a midsummer ritual involving a total free-for-all of murder and people-eating. It is not kind to the Finnish at all, but it is very funny about it.

And the question of what exactly these people are is something I'm thinking about even after the movie has ended. We get an explanation of the fake cannibal festival that is surprisingly in-depth considering the small scope of the film, but there's something weird and trope-defying about the method to the Finns' madness. They don't act like typical Texas Chainsaw cannibals who lure you in with hospitality and then kill you and eat you for dinner, they're more akin to the classic zombie in that they just bite and eat people in the streets, but they're also in full possession of their faculties, and cannot spread their flesh-eating tendencies via a bite. (This is proven by an unfortunate Pakistani guy who married a Finnish woman, knowing of her nature and reaching an agreement with her, but finds that all bets are off once she dies.) I think movies like this that are based around an old idea but manage to execute it with a huge amount of innovation and also an engaging and emotionally stirring human element are extremely impressive. I can't say this was perfect from all angles but I laughed at it, I felt moved by the main characters, and I was interested in the lore behind it. There's something inherently amusing about a movie where the monsters are just Finnish people gone rogue.