Plucked from an idyllic suburb somewhere in Finland, Hatching opens with the pristine nuclear family of four with their blonde hair, blue eyes, and perfect teeth filming a vlog for their mother’s social media. Played by Stepford Wife stand-in Sophia Heikkilä, the mother is the leader of the family, bathed in cakey foundation and dainty frills, galavanting around her living room and happily putting her family on display. Her daughter, Tinja (Solalinna), idolizes her, and all the generational trauma that she passes down, desperate for her affection and adoration.
This model family portrait is cursed by a raven, crashing through the glass, disrupting the space with its shrill caw piercing through the serenity of the scene. With a crack of its neck, the mother disposes of the raven in front of her daughter, unaffected by the grisly act committed in honor of preserving the order of the household. It’s a ripple effect that consumes Tinja, and the raven is reborn through a daughter’s desperation to reclaim her mother’s love and attention.
Bergholm’s suburbia is bathed in pastels – pinks, yellows, blues, and greens wash over the film like spring candies, with big floral prints to transport the audience into this delicate household. Tinja’s ravenlike creature brings disorder to this dreamy home, a monster made of twisted bones and dripping in gore and other sticky fluids. There’s a Cronenbergian aspect to the creature, a sickening, twisted pulpiness similar to that of The Brood or The Fly, from which it’s impossible to look away. Tinja’s beast of a bird is hideously successful, but an inspired monster design does not make a film.
Where Hatching falls flat is with its characters. Stone-cold like statues, their perfection is admirably purposeful, but a bit dull to watch. Where a deranged lack of empathy can sometimes work in films like Dogtooth, there is no compelling nature to this porcelain family. It’s like stepping into a dollhouse, and while beautiful aesthetically, the hollowness permeates the atmosphere almost too well. Like the family it depicts, Hatching comes across a bit stiff.
Hatching blends sugar and spice with vomit and gloop, a fairy tale gone grim, utilizing familiar tropes to unveil a story about the birth of a mother’s overbearing demand for perfection. The pressure to be everything for someone else is overwhelming, an all-consuming powerful force that stems from idolization and the need for positive affirmation. Hatching does its best at cracking the surface, but never quite sinks its claws as deep as it wants to.
This article appears in April 29 • 2022.