Tomris Laffly Motherhood is scary stuff. From “Rosemary’s Baby” through to “The Babadook” and “Hereditary,” a certain breed of horror film has taught us as much.
Equally disturbing, in Hanna Bergholm’s inventive, alarmingly sunny genre outing “Hatching,” is adolescence: lurking under a protective mother’s wings, waiting to crack and come of age in a Finnish suburb’s suffocating, expertly calibrated atmosphere.But “Hatching” is no blood-soaked “Carrie.” One could instead think of it as the weird lovechild of “American Beauty” and a grotesque version of “E.T.,” with the uncanny touch of Yorgos Lanthimos.
Even this comparison feels incomplete in defining Bergholm’s directorial debut, a wicked foray into youthful anxieties that is admitted short on genuine scares, but full of delicious squirms and cringes through Bergholm’s skillful play with body horror and doppelgänger tropes — the same spirit that gave us both Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” and Andrzej Żuławski’s “Possession.” Written by Ilja Rautsi, the story centers on Tinja (sensational newcomer Siiri Solalinna), a dollishly wide-eyed, lonely tween gymnast who’d do anything to impress her overbearing, unnamed mother (Sophia Heikkilä, subtly terrifying), be it malnourishing herself for the sake of sport or practicing a flip on high bars until her hands bleed.
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