Motherhood is a complex thing. You spend months carrying and growing a human being inside your body. The baby is very much a part of you, until all of a sudden, it’s not. Once born, a baby becomes its own person, and as they grow and change over the years, they become harder and harder to control. For some, motherhood is a gift, something they wouldn’t trade for the world. But what about those that secretly resent their children? As a mother, how do you effectively love a child, especially a daughter, if you can’t help but resent them as well? These are just some of the themes explored in Finnish director Hanna Bergholm’s Hatching.
The film tells the story of Tinja (Siiri Solalinna), a young daughter on the cusp of adolescence who finds and hatches a mysterious egg she discovers in the forest near her house. There is a lot going on here. For starters, Tinja’s overbearing, social media obsessed mother (Sophia Heikkilä) cares more about how her family is projected to her followers than whether they are actually happy. Within the film’s first minutes, she brutally wrings the neck of a crow that gets into the family’s living room where it knocks over and breaks expensive baubles, wreaking havoc on the perfect image the mother has spent countless hours trying to perfect. She is a woman hiding behind a perfect façade, and her fake happiness and desperate attempts to convey perfection deeply affect her family, especially Tinja, privy to her mother’s darkest secrets, a confidant in matters she did not ask to know about.
The film’s balance is created by this specific relationship between Tinja and her mother. They are constantly projected as being at once in sync with one another but also deeply at odds. Tinja is a moderately talented gymnast, and her mother — who was a figure skater when she was younger — continues to live out her fantasies of being a top athlete by pushing Tinja to her limits even when it’s clear that gymnastics are not her daughter’s dream. The father (Jani Volanen) and Tinja’s younger brother Matias (Oiva Ollila) are the men of the house, roles they fill passively having no real say in anything that comes to pass throughout the entire movie. It is very clear that Bergholm set out to make a film about women — specifically the relationship between mothers and daughters — and for the most part, the men in the film do nothing but misinterpret and get in the way.
When Tinja finds the egg, she becomes a mother herself, carefully incubating it inside the cut-open stomach of a large stuffed teddy bear in her bedroom. Her reasons for hatching the egg seem to be driven by her desire to do the opposite of her mother (after all, she did watch her mother mercilessly kill a crow with her bare hands), and as the egg grows in size to epic proportions, Tinja begins to develop a connection to it that solidifies when her tears and bloody hands seep into the egg’s surface. Once hatched, Tinja mothers the bird-like creature that emerges, but when it starts to play out her own dark fantasies, she is forced to decide whether it lives or dies.
Without giving away the whole film, Hatching is a movie about how motherhood changes people. Sometimes this change is for the better, but sometimes it’s not. In mother and daughter relationships specifically, there is a strong bond that is often created between the two women that can often be seen as destructive. Bergholm seems to be asking if it’s possible for a mother and daughter to live peacefully alongside one another without either woman being eclipsed by the other’s presence. Overall, Hatching is a great addition to the horror genre and draws comparisons to films like The Virgin Suicides and Malignant for the ways it chooses to explore the complex issues of motherhood and adolescence. It also gets bonus points for using practical effects instead of CGI to create the creature that hatches from the egg, a decision that truly adds to the film’s creepy vibe. Hatching is a film that’s not to be missed and will most likely leave audiences talking for a long time to come.
Photo courtesy of IFC Midnight
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