Hatching: A Horrifying Directorial Debut

Body horror as a subgenre is the most divisive form a horror movie can take. Viewers tend to polarize around it and either love it or hate it with no middle ground because of the grotesque form that these movies take. As a directorial debut, Hatching takes a coming-of-age story, puts a fresh spin on it, and establishes Hanna Bergholm as an outstanding new voice in the genre.

Hatching has a pretty straightforward premise; it is the story of a young adolescent girl named Tinja who seeks the approval of her perfectionist and obsessive mother. She goes out into the forest and takes home an egg and hatches it. The creature feeds off of Tinja’s anger so the movie becomes a somewhat nuanced look at the impact of hiding emotions rather than expressing them. In this way, Hatching has thematic similarities to Turning Red, however that is where the similarities end.

The movie’s effects are some of the most interesting practical horror effects done in recent memory. Similar to Nick Cage’s 2020 movie Color Out of Space, there is a lot of puppetry in play to create the monster in the movie which just adds to the atmosphere of unease that the movie builds. The movie aims to for a fairytale feel so the puppetry aspect of these sequences add to that motif by creating grotesque images that are unsettling and still feel at home in the world the movie is creating.

It is worth noting that the movie is in Finnish, not English so there are subtitles so audience members who do not like watching movies with subtitles may bump into that. That said, at just under an hour and a half it is not a colossal time commitment and it is worth a watch. If for no other reason, the movie is worth a watch because this could be Bergholm’s Fruitvale Station, Cop Car, or Evil Dead in that it is a debut film that is so well done that she could get major studio work using it as a calling card.

Final Rating: 9/10