Hatching opens in theaters on April 29, 2022.
A film that lives at the nexus between body horror and coming of age, Hanna Bergholm’s Hatching (or Pahanhautojain in its original Finnish) is spun from delightfully creepy ideas, which it brings to life using ingenuous practical effects. It also rests on the incredible caliber of its 12-year-old lead, and while it occasionally gets bogged down by metaphors that can be both mixed and thuddingly literal, its story — of a young gymnast who hatches a mysterious egg — allows just enough scattered moments of stunning performance and precise tonal control. Its numerous tensionless bits may eventually stack up, but enough in its 86-minute runtime hits the mark.
Siiri Solalinna plays 12-year-old gymnast Tinja, a driven young girl introduced through close-ups of her bony stature as she warms up before a bar routine. This visual framing sets the stage for both a subtle tale of body image, and a more overt joyride through twisted bodily transformations, even though Tinja herself isn’t the subject of this — not literally, at least. What follows is both an eerie family saga, in which the presence of her domineering mother (Sophia Heikkilä), who pushes her to her physical and emotional limits, finally begins to take its toll, and an Amblin-esque creature adventure wrung out into the shape of a visceral tale of bodily fluid and self-recognition.
Tinja’s family is rather uncanny, between a perfectionist mother who molds Tinja in her own image, and her bratty younger brother who looks a little too much like a spitting image of their unassuming father, right down to their coordinated outfits and matching spectacles. Her mother doesn’t stop smiling as she endlessly vlogs their daily routine; that is, until a crow ominously rams into the window of their garishly decorated upper-class home, after which the grinning matriarch puts it out of its misery. It’s the first peek behind the curtain of their pristine existence — the first of many — and it soon leads to Tinja discovering an abandoned egg, with which she quickly forms a bond.
After about 20 minutes of tightly controlled atmospheric scenes — in which a perturbed young Solalinna silently internalizes the story’s peculiar mood — Hatching floors the gas pedal and has the mysterious egg grow to nearly human size before revealing a disturbing humanoid bird creature within. Dripping with gooey afterbirth, and as skeletal as Tinja herself, this being often behaves viciously, but it also seems to imprint on Tinja, who begins to hide it around the house, away from her family’s prying eyes. In becoming a mother to it, and showing it the kind of warthm her own mother seems to lack, Tinja begins to break a cycle of abuse, neglect, and narcissism that has long festered and left her with a looming sadness — but avoiding the same pitfalls of her mother’s parenting might be easier said than done.
Effects artist Gustav Hoegen (of Disney’s Star Wars sequels) crafts a muscly, blood-soaked animatronic creature that’s as disturbing as it is sympathetic, and while the film begins to switch modes both wildly and frequently — its journey from slow-burn meditation to trashy B-movie is whiplash-inducing — it also zeroes in on key moments that expand on its litany of metaphors with often tongue-in-cheek humor. There are hints that Tinja might have an eating disorder, born from her mother’s tightly controlled nutritional regimen, and when her bodily reactions stray into bulimic territory, the question of “What does this mutated baby bird eat?” is answered in hilarious fashion. However, as the story zig-zags from one allegory to the next — among them, a number of puberty metaphors that soon fall by the wayside — its moments of physical discomfort are matched by an equally unsettling emotional undercurrent, when Tinja becomes burdened with some of her mother’s darkest secrets, forcing her to become withdrawn. Solalinna’s performance, as she balances bearing witness to the creature’s bloodthirsty horrors with the her own instinct to protect it, is marvelous to behold, and her work becomes all the more commendable when the creature begins to take more human form — not only because’s Tinja’s relationship to it becomes more complicated, but because after a certain point in its growth, Solalinna plays the creature herself, with a mesmerizing, full-bodied commitment to its hunger and anguish.
Hatching is a story about embracing physical and emotional ugliness, and a film that also manages to be tender in unexpected ways. While it seldom succeeds at blending its horror with its more reflective and dramatic scenes — when it tries, the result is often a mechanical impression of much better horror films — Solalinna displays such thoughtfulness and maturity at every turn that Tinja’s closeups remains riveting even when the film starts feeling tonally scattered. When it begins to plod with overly literal and linear elucidations (most of them in removed medium shots that feel aimed more at explanation than emotion), Solalinna continues to anchor the story’s few remaining mysteries, like the ethereal, seemingly spiritual connection between Tinja and the creature, which editor Linda Jildmalm crafts with a sense of poetic rhythm, cutting between their perspectives during moments of movement and heightened tension.
Solalinna, in turn, walks a fine line between concern and disdain for the creature — the very same feelings Tinja seems to harbor towards herself, as she oscillates between an animalistic survival instinct and apologetic self-preservation. It’s perhaps one of the smartest and most nuanced performances from a young actress in years, especially since it circles the emotional mechanics of abuse and projects them onto a delightfully twisted tale of a disgusting bird monster — whose unhinged animalism Solalinna is also tasked with embodying. Her work is a testament to how make-or-break a performance can be to a movie, especially in the horror genre, and she makes Hatching worth a watch despite its many shortcomings.
from IGN Reviews https://ift.tt/kArlMU0
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