Hatching (Finland, 2022)

It occurred to me that my list this year leans more heavily towards black comedy and weirdness than actual horror. I tried to remedy this at the last minute by adding a few films where reviews suggested they might be nasty. While I’m not entirely sure I’d call Hatching a straightforward horror film, it’s certainly dark enough to help balance things out.

Hatching is currently available for rental in the UK.

Synopsis

Tinja is a tween girl living in an up-market suburban home in Finland. Almost immediately, we see how much of her superficially perfect life is artifice, created by her image-obsessed mother. Everything the family does is packaged for social media as “the everyday life of a perfect Finnish family”. Even Tinja’s success as a gymnast is only a proxy for her mother’s ambitions.

When a crow flies into the house and disrupts one of the family’s livestreams, smashing ornaments and causing chaos, Tinja’s mother cold-bloodedly breaks its neck and throws it in the compost bin. That night, Tinja hears screaming from the woods and finds the dying bird has crawled back to its nest. After euthanising the crow, Tinja rescues an egg from its nest and takes it home.

Over the course of the next few days, the egg grows impossibly until it is the size of Tinja. A hideous bird creature hatches from it, and Tinja feels compelled to protect it and hide it from her family. As she takes on more of a maternal role, naming the bird creature Alli, it tries to protect Tinja in turn. Of course, as a predatory monster, its idea of protection can get pretty horrible. And things only grow more complicated when the creature begins to look more human.

But just what is this bird creature changing into? What terrible thing will Tinja’s mother do next? And could the addition of a hideous monster to this family make it any worse than it already is?

General Thoughts

Director Hanna Bergholm has said that Hatching didn’t start out as a horror film, but an exploration of the effect of a domineering mother on her daughter. That element is still at the core of the film, but I’m not sure it would have been anywhere near as effective if not for the weird elements.

Don’t get me wrong: the mother is simply awful. It would be trite to call her the real monster of this film, but it also wouldn’t be inaccurate. As bad as her cloying control of Tinja is, not to mention her constant need for the validation of strangers through social media, the darkest moment comes when she starts treating her daughter as a confidant, sharing details of her new lover. The mother even makes Tinja complicit in this affair, bringing her along when she visits her lover and trying to get them to bond.

With someone like this in Tinja’s life, her relationship with a predatory, shape-changing bird monster seems healthy in comparison. And the film leans into this, making Alli sympathetic as well as repellent. She is terrifying to look at, and dangerous to those around her, but she is vulnerable and caring in her own way. We can absolutely understand why Tinja would want to sing her lullabies or chew up food and vomit it into a dish for her.

Given how prominent a role Alli plays, Hatching would not work at all without the right special effects. The puppets and prostheses that capture the various stages of Alli’s development are perfect, showing us just how creepy she is even as she melts our hearts. The sound design is equally impressive, with Alli’s shrieks being the stuff of nightmares.

Verdict

I wasn’t really sure I was enjoying Hatching for the first 20 minutes. While the opening scene of the bird trashing the artificial perfection of Tinja’s home was striking, I worried that watching Tinja being slowly crushed by her mother’s expectations was going to be too miserable to enjoy. Once the egg hatched and we caught our first glimpse of Alli, however, everything turned around.

The reveal of Alli comes surprisingly early on. I wondered if the titular hatching might be the climax of the film, but it turns out to be the event that starts everything moving. Watching this monster struggle to fit into the human world just as Tinja struggles to fit into her family is a perfect parallel, but the film has a lot more to offer than metaphor. Alli’s repulsiveness and predatory nature create some great moments of horror as we wonder just how far she will go to protect her adopted mother.

At the same time, this is a poignant and often funny film. The narcissism of Tinja’s mother may be rage-inducing, but it also provides a fair few laughs. And the weird superficiality of her family’s perfection creates as many moments of comedy as of discomfort.

After a month where I’ve complained about so many endings, it is refreshing to watch a film that gets it so right. There is a terrible inevitability to the resolution that hurts in all the right ways. This is what I want from horror.

To sum up, Hatching gets my highest recommendation. It’s a thoughtful, emotional film that never sacrifices horror in pursuit of its larger goals. Simply brilliant, and the next strong contender for my film of the month.

The October Horror Movie Challenge

Please do join in and share your own thoughts with us about this or any other films as the month goes on. You can usually find us on BlueSky, Reddit, Discord, or lurking in the dark corners of your home.

If you would like to play along at home, my provisional selections are:

Heretic (USA, 2024)
The Sadness (Taiwan, 2021)
The Uninvited (USA, 1944)
The Lodge (UK/USA, 2019)
WolfCop (Canada, 2014)
Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (Czechoslovakia, 1970)
The Monkey (USA, 2025)
Sister Midnight (India/UK, 2024)
Roadgames (Australia, 1981)
Nightmare City (Italy, 1985)
Dangerous Animals (Australia, 2025)
Dead Talents Society (Taiwan, 2024)
Winterbeast (USA, 1992)
Byzantium (UK/Ireland, 2013)
The Ugly Stepsister (Norway, 2025)
A Page of Madness (Japan, 1926)
Heart Eyes (USA, 2025)
Grafted (New Zealand, 2024)
Arrebato (Spain, 1979)
Hatching (Finland, 2022)
Abigail (USA, 2024)
Ganja & Hess (USA, 1973)
The Devil’s Bath (Austria, 2025)
Pieces (Spain, 1982)
Infested (France, 2023)
Best Wishes to All (Japan, 2022)
A Cat in the Brain (Italy, 1990)
Enys Men (UK, 2022)
Creature From the Black Lagoon (USA, 1954)
Perewangan (Indonesia, 2024)
Bring Her Back (Australia, 2025)

A Final Note

If you have been enticed here by these posts, please do look around at some of our other film reviews. We also have a podcast, called The Good Friends of Jackson Elias, which occasionally covers horror films. If this appeals, you might want to check out some of the following episodes.