Hatching (Movie Review)
Hatching is the next coming-of-age horror movie we’ve been itching for. Classics like Carrie (1976), Ginger Snaps (2000), and Raw (2016) give us a peek into older adolescence and burgeoning womanhood, but not until Hatching have I seen a horror movie capture the growing pains and confusion of younger adolescence.
Hanna Bergholm's Hatching follows the story of Tinja (Siiri Solalinna), a middle-school aged girl with few friends and a very artificial home life. She struggles to find the perfection that her mommy-blogger mother seeks, and she longs for true, tender nurturing. Tinja is able to project such nurturing onto an egg she finds, which grows mysteriously and concerningly large, until it hatches a grotesque bird creature. We follow Tinja and Alli, the bird creature, as they navigate the murky waters of early adolescence.
The plot hits a lot of beats that resonate with me: monstrous menstruation, monstrous motherhood, and body horror. With themes like those, the concept alone piqued my interest. Admirably, the movie delivers on those themes, as well as on production and overall execution.
Siiri Solalinna shines in her role as Tinja, and her performance becomes increasingly impressive as the plot evolves and she’s given more challenging scenes to play. Sophia Heikkila, who plays Mother, has a great presence on screen, as well, and is effectively upsetting. Their scenes together are poignantly painful, and will resonate with the perfectionist daughters of the world.
The overall styling in Hatching also deserves credit. The family home is highly stylized, curated as a mommy-blogger influencer’s home would be. It makes for a visually beautiful set with an undercurrent of anxiety and perfectionism.
Body horror plays a large role in the film, mostly around the bird creature Alli and the destruction she causes. Weak stomachs will quiver at the feeding and transformation scenes, but only because they’re wonderfully realistic and appropriately quease-inducing.
For Cronenberg fans, there are notes of The Brood in the body horror scenes and in the psychic connection between Tinja and Alli. The clandestine link between the two becomes one of the more salient and stressful parts of the movie, and it crescendos to a very satisfying end.
Hatching is certainly worth a watch. It touches on themes we’ve seen before in horror, but they’re covered in innovative ways. Eldest daughters of the world who struggle with perfectionism and people-pleasing: you’ll see yourself on screen.