“Hatching” has the quality of a fable, and like the best fables, it has meanings that reverberate well beyond its story. It’s a horror movie with something to say about the consequences of misguided parenting — you could say the same for “Frankenstein” — but “Hatching” is bigger than its ideas, and uncanny and unsettling in unconscious ways.
芬兰语言电影,由汉娜伯格holm, is a story of a 12-year-old girl growing up in a family dominated by an image-obsessed, narcissistic mother (Sophia Heikkilä). As the movie starts, mom is making yet another YouTube video for her series on the joys of family life. The house is full of pastel floral wallpaper that mom thinks indicates a happy home, but instead broadcasts her self-delusion.
Suddenly, a raven gets into the house and starts crashing into everything, knocking over and breaking various knickknacks. The daughter, Tinja (Siiri Solalinna), throws a towel over the bird and starts moving to release it outside, when the mother takes the bird and snaps its neck, then instructs Tinja to put the dead bird into organic recycling. Sothisis what happens if you upset Mom’s fantasy of domestic bliss.
妈妈是一个有趣的character and well played by Heikkilä, not as a monster in a horror movie, not as a villain, but as one of those frustrating people who never doubt their virtue or their judgment, and who can forgive themselves anything. This is not someone who can be talked to and not someone that anyone would want as their mother.
It’s Tinja’s misfortune that Mom has ideas about her, that she is supposed to become a world-class gymnast, when her talent seems to reside more in the high second tier. So she is driven and lonely and nervous all the time, which in some way leads her to nurturing an egg she finds, belonging to the dead bird. The egg gets bigger and bigger and eventually hatches into something slimy and monstrous, and that’s pretty much where the story begins.
If you want to reduce poetry into prose, the general idea at work in “Hatching” is that the actions of parents have long-term repercussions. And they don’t kick in all at once, but they build. In a telling moment, the mother alludes to her own past as a competitive skater. She talks about herself in triumphant terms, but between the lines one gets the impression that she wasn’t a champion. So what damage did her own mother inflict onher?
As much as “Hatching” feels fable-like, it’s not programmatic, in that not everything is geared toward a single message or interpretation. There are extraneous elements here that don’t fit into any particular scheme, but that feel significant. The father, for one thing, is presented as a hapless nonentity, too afraid to connect with his daughter or acknowledge the results of his wife’s selfishness.
The most unexpected character is the wife’s lover, a widowed carpenter who turns out to be a lovely guy, warm and honest and capable of drawing out Tinja in ways that her own father can’t. Such is the case several times in “Hatching,” where we expect a cliche and get something or someone more complicated.
The result is that “Hatching” maintains the texture of real-life normality even as it’s spinning out into grotesque body horror.
M“Hatching”:Horror. Starring Siiri Solalinna and Sophia Heikila. Directed by Hanna Bergholm. In Finnish with English subtitles. (Not rated. 86 minutes.) In theaters Friday, May 6.