For many folks, even some genre fans, body horror is simply too prohibitively repulsive to enjoy. Even among an audience who can stomach them, films in this idiom have to thread a tricky needle. It’s all too easy for them to cross over into laughable terrain, whether due to absurdity of premise or goofball special effects. Thankfully, bird-based (yes, really) body-horror picture Hatching — the directorial debut from Finnish filmmaker Hanna Bergholm — has a lot of opportunities to fail, but it never does.
Tinja (Siiri Solalinna) is an adolescent aspiring gymnast with an overbearing apparent Stepford Wife of a mother. Mom (Sophia Heikkilä) runs a carefully curated lifestyle blog called Lovely Everyday Life, despite the fact that she openly cuckolds her passive, khaki-wearing dork of a husband, holds Tinja to oppressive, unrealistic standards, and all but ignores her young son, who nobody seems to like. (To be fair, he does kind of suck.) After mercy-killing a wounded crow in the woods near her home, Tinja adopts the bird’s egg, tucking it away in her room and tending to it as it grows exponentially. Ultimately, the thing hatches, and it is by no means a standard-issue Scandinavian crow. I’ll do my best not to spoil the reveal of the creature that emerges, but suffice it to say this endeavor results in a classic, gut-churning little dose of body horror.
The premise and to an extent the effects — mostly animatronic, a blessing — are extremely Cronenbergian. Some might detect a bit of Lynch’s Eraserhead in the mix as well. There’s some good creature design and a well-paced reveal, and as with any decent effort in this genre, the weird, gooey, fleshy thing itself is of course a metaphor. A metaphor for parental expectations, perhaps. Or puberty, or self-image. Or the expectations we create for ourselves and others vis-à-vis social media. It’s a prism through which you can project your own aesthetic and emotional issues. Or, alternately, you can see the weird, gooey, fleshy thing as just a weird, gooey, fleshy thing and nothing more. Though that might reveal a bit more about you than you realize.
Hatching is an economical horror film, moving along at a fast clip with an 86-minute runtime, just a few sets and a cast of a half-dozen or so. Indeed, the plot feels as though it could tip over into laughable territory at any moment, but thanks primarily to Solalinna — who turns in a performance that grows more complicated as the film progresses, elevating a premise that could fall flat with a less talented young actor — it all works.
Engaging and gross with steadily mounting stakes, Hatching doesn’t overstay its welcome, and sports not an ounce of fat worth trimming.
