Finnish writer-director Hanna Bergholm makes her feature debut with this bizarre and richly designed body-horror-satire about family dysfunction, body image and eating disorders. It’s a movie which borrows a bit from others – chiefly Spielberg’s ET – but there is something brashly distinctive here as well.
We start with an Instagrammably picture-perfect family of ineffable blondness. Tinja (Siiri Solalinna) is a shy tweenager who is a gymnastics competitor. Maybe there are films where gymnastics are not a metaphor for misery and self-harm but this isn’t one of them. Tinja has a cheery dad (Jani Volanen) who is a bit of a beta-male chump in his shorts and his sweater tied around his neck, and she has a brattish kid brother, Matias (OIva Ollila). But she is being driven super hard by her icily ambitious mother (Sophia Heikkilä), who has a scar on her leg hinting at her own frustrated gymnastic ambitions. And Tinja’s mum also imperiously shoots a daily vlog about her too-good-to-be-true family, entitled Lovely Everyday Life. (Bergholm must surely have considered that as a title for her film.)
The horror begins when Tinja steals an egg laid by a sinister black bird and the egg hatches into a nightmarish creature which becomes Tinja’s secret pet, slowly morphing into a Mr Hyde version of her called Alli. This hatching coincides with, and is also somehow psychically caused by, a family crisis: Tinja has accidentally chanced across her mother kissing the handsome handyman Tero (Reino Nordin) and her mother, far from denying it, privately asks Tinja to keep this a secret from her father. But Tero is no mere 2D toyboy: he is a sensitive, intelligent man, a widower with a baby and is a very plausible stepfather, especially as Tinja’s mother is openly, dreamily talking about being in love with him.
Perhaps there is a part of Tinja which feels that being made complicit in all this is a kind of abuse. Certainly she can hardly process this terrible upheaval at the same time as she is preparing for her demanding championships: Alli is the symbol of her violent breakdown, her own hatching into her mother’s adult world of secrets, delusions and lies. An elegantly horrible coming-of-age.
• Hatching is released on 16 September in cinemas.
