Nightborn, directed by Hanna Bergholm, is the fantastic and frightening tale of new parenthood. It just won the top jury prize at Fantasia, and you can check it out on Shudder soon. See why you should below.
In 2022, Finnish writer-director Hannah Bergholm cracked open the horror egg of Hatching, a film that ended up in my top 10 of the year. It’s a nasty story of parent-and-child rifts and terrors through a monstrous mother and how it affects her daughter. Now she returns with another story of parent-and-child but in a very different manner. The monstrous child is a well-worn subgenre, but Bergholm makes it her own with an effective, strong folk horror vibe of new family terror.
Chosen as Cheval Noir Trophy for Best Film in this year’s Fantasia Film Festival and premiering on Shudder July 31st, Nightborn, co-written with Ilja Rautsi (who also co-wrote Hatching), is beautifully shot, effectively scary, a well-performed story of unexpected infant issues, of the forest creeping in, and a general aura of unease. A young couple, Jon and Saga, played by Harry Potter’s Rupert Grint and Finnish star Seidi Haarla, return to her abandoned grandparents’ home deep in the Finnish woods to start their new life. They want to leave hard city life behind and raise three kids in a simple life. Outside the house? A glen with strange-shaped trees: ones that look like screaming people or milky breasts (required reference to The Last Unicorn’s tit-tree). Well, this location awakens something in them, and… well.. Baby one is on the way. Born with hair and strange desires, is it a child of the forest, a normal child that looks different, or something else entirely? And how will this unexpected outcome affect the couple?
That’s the crux of Nightborn. How parents deal with a different child in different ways. In the past, deep in folklore, children we now know as autistic were seen as Changelings, inhuman creatures pretending to be human. Is little Kuura a human or something else? Is he monstrous, or is she not well (an overused note surely, as also seen recently in Die My Love)? Nightborn takes the possible horrors of any new parent and takes it to a higher level
With their plans not quite as expected, how can Jon and Saga survive, metaphorically as a couple or perhaps more literally? Bergholm and Rautsi’s script deftly moves through its thoughts. Being a parent is hard; it never goes the same as expected, even if the child isn’t hairy, in pain with clothes on, and craving blood (no, this isn’t a remake of It’s Alive, though at times the puppet child is just as awkward as Larry Cohen’s cult classic). How the pair and their different methods and ideas deal with the situation is fascinating and nuanced. There isn’t a clear delineation, at first at least, but grey areas and shifts as the plot unfolds. Jon and Saga are well written and wonderfully performed. Grint was often left to mug and whine as Ron Weasley, but in Nightborn he shows a care for performance as an increasingly more distant and wrong husband. But this is Haarla’s movie, as the mother of the child who has to figure out what they both need; sliding into depressive thoughts as her body can’t provide what the baby needs and he’s not the child she expected. It’s a lonely experience, especially if Jon isn’t seeing her at her level, and her own mother is as cold and sniping as the mother from Hatching. There’s a lot to dig into, and Haarala, Bergholm, and Rautsi do so well.
Like Hatching, Nightborn is a gorgeous film of a very specific design. The house is first seen in dereliction, and the part of me that loves this sort of look was saddened when the home was repaired before the baby came, but at least the newly refurbished house was such a great design by production designer Kari Kankaanpaa. Deep and dark, Pietari Peltola’s cinematography looks like a 35mm (not shot on but feels it) fairy tale in the depth and look, especially in the nursery and the trees around the home. And this is a folk horror in the woods, so expect plenty of nature encroaching, and the way it does is delicious. BTW, for those who are here for the blood, there is plenty, with Jon and Saga often soaked from head to toe.
Nightborn justly won the top prize at the Fantasia International Film Festival (running in Montreal from July 16th to August 2nd) with an all-too-close-to-home story of the horrors of new parenthood, and the trials and travails that might come from that. Real life might have less bloodshed and not be quite as cinematically gorgeous, but that’s the nature of a film like this: take the true-to-life and expand. With fantastic performances from Rupert Grint and especially Seidi Haarla, Nightborn delivers (heh). Check it out on Shudder starting July 31st.