Hatching

This movie is an excellent metaphorical story of a modern family with people ignoring their real life and family for an online presence. If you dont look at it as just another horror movie full of jump scares and nonsensical decisions of the actors, and instead see the monster character as the secondary personality that the girl developes, its a good movie.

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Hatching (2022) is a Finnish Horror movie my wife and I caught in theatres this weekend. The storyline follows a little girl who finds a unique crow and it's egg and decides to bring the egg home and nurture it through birth. She would never guess what comes out of the egg... Meanwhile her parents are going through a divorce and there's troubles at home. This movie is directed by Hanna Bergholm in her directorial debut and stars Sophia Heikkilä (Invisible Heroes), Jani Volanen (Rumble), Oiva Ollila and Siiri Solalinna. The storyline for this is very creative and unique. The characters are very well cast and the mother is portrayed perfectly by Heikkilä. The little girl was a bit annoying at times, but there's so much to like about this movie. The creature evolves well over time and they use great special effects to make it happen. The feeding scenes were ultra gross and hard for me to watch. The use of sound effects were excellent and made me cringe in many scenes. There's also some really good jump scenes and sequences that make you uncomfortable. There's a lot going on in this movie. This is a fresh entry into the horror genre that I would consider a must see. I'd score this a 7/10 and strongly recommend it.

... and it's actually an excellent wet puppet at that. But the film is about more than that. It does have a very topical theme as we have been learning more and more about how manipulative social media can be and how depressing seeing the seemingly perfect lives of others can be. Well, the calculated image the family is forced to maintain by the domineering matriarch might not reflect reality, or from another point of view, living a public life brings it's own burdens. In the first act we see the mother maintaining the branding she has cultivated for the family on her blog. While shooting more material, a blackbird smashes into the room and causes plenty of chaos before Tinja, our main character, manages to catch it. While Tinja would like to set the bird free, mother just kills it instead and instructs Tinja to get rid of it. Next night, Tinja hears the cawing of the bird, which hadn't died after all and managed to get out of the compost bin. Tinja tries to help it, but can't, so she ends up mercy killing it. To her dismay, she finds an egg in a nest, which she decides to care for. As it happens, it's not just a normal egg. It begins to grow at an amazing speed before hatching into something that breaks Tinja's routine and is the cause for much mayhem. Nothing here is subtle. You can see the ending coming miles away, but at the same time, this is a topic that needs to be talked about in the media and horror is often the right medium for discussing complicated subjects like this. The movie feels more like an opening argument than a discussion, but it also manages to not be as simplistic as it might seem early on. The parents are more complex than expected based on the first act. Not much, mind you, but there is more going on than first meets the eye. I'm not sure the movie quite hits the tone it wishes. There are some fairly comedic scenes, but I'm not sure the levity works in favor of the overall goals of the movie. Also, Tinja doesn't get much of a chance to be funny, so in this sense she feels somewhat out of place in her family. Overall, I did like it, but I also felt that there is some amount of wasted potential. But the puppet is very cool.

This warped fairy tale from Finland hits the ground running with a wonderful opening scene that really sets the tone. A perfect family (husband, wife, young son and daughter) enjoys a perfect moment in the perfect living room of their perfect home. But then, an uninvited guest makes an appearance. Like a Poe-esque harbinger of doom, a jet black raven swoops in through an open window and destroys this idyllic tableau of domestic bliss. And then things get really strange. Hatching is essentially a coming-of-age story, a little like ET, if it was directed by Ari Aster instead of Steven Spielberg. With great performances by Sophia Heikkila as the selfie-stick wielding stage mom and her long suffering daughter, played by Sirii Solalinna, this is a very promising debut feature from Hanna Bergholm. Uncanny, unsettling and unpredictable.

I can think of other words to describe this movie, but none of them seem to fit it so well. You'd probably expect the ugliness to come from the body horror aspects - it is, after all, a movie where one of the characters eats vomit off the floor - but that pales in comparison to the disgusting individuals that make up the protagonist's family. Unfortunately this isn't achieved by any clever or insightful writing, opting instead for a collection of clichés you've no doubt seen a million times before in made-for-TV dramas. Spoiled little brat you just want to punch in the teeth? Check. Sad, spineless husband in a unilateral open relationship? Check. Heartless, superficial mother living vicariously through her child no matter the consequences? Double check. As for the daughter, she lacks any personality outside of being a victim for the audiences to insert as. On top of being simplistic archetypes, these characters don't evolve or show any depth throughout the story. There's nothing engaging about them, which strongly contributes to the feeling of tedium that permeates through it all. In fact, it is only the literal, physical growth of the creature, coupled with some beautiful puppetry, that provides an incentive to keep watching. Once the creature reaches its final form, what little momentum the film had completely evaporates. 3/10 (0 stars for the story and characters, 3 stars for the special effects)

Interesting, ambitious, creative, weird, and well-made but something just didn't sit right for me. My favorite part was the wallpaper in the girl's room. This wasn't scary but it was gross in a body horror and lots of vomit way. Overall, this was just okay.

There is a lot of pomposity going on in some of the reviews for this film (such as, I don't know where the hell the intellectual was supposed to be in this blase piece of tripe). The first half dozen or so of the reviews seem to have been worded by 1 person; which is not an unusual thing to find on IMDb film reviews. Most people are liars, dishonest and manipulative at their core roots and, with reviews that are seemingly over the top just to attempt to improve its outcome etc! I have given it 3 stars purely for the nicely done cinematography, the acting and the creature animatronics. I am a person with a very open mind who believes that all things, to a point, are possible. However the story/plot line for this would have given Charles Darwin the giggles and Jules Verne would have shook his head at the absurdity of the creature. Now I know that in nature there are certain creatures that can mimic their surroundings (usually as a way for self protection) but, to go from a hatched egg, as a seriously ugly bird, and evolve within a week to a human looking Doppelgänger is just ludicrously stupid; evolution takes thousands, hundreds of thousands and even millions of years to happen. The most annoying thing I found with it was the no background info about the creature. A lot of stuff appeared to have just been skipped over. Even the base story, of an obnoxious mother pushing her child to succeed in a way that she could not herself, was boring; especially the parts at the gymnasium and staying the weekend with her mothers lover at his home. Her little brother was a really obnoxious annoying brat also! This gets a soiled diaper merit from me...I wonder what thoughts those who not watched it yet will come away with!?

The movie is trying so hard to be horror but fails spectacularly at that during the first 15 minutes by missing one of the most basic things that make horror films scary: you do not fully introduce the monster/bad/evil/whatever to the audience at first. You keep building tension and giving small clues all the way to the end, and then do the big reveal. I'm not saying that this is the only acceptable way to write horror, but at least in this movie the deviation from that formula does not work, in my opinion. After that huge blunder in the beginning, I was basically waiting for the movie to end. This is really unfortunate, since I think the topic of the film has a lot of potential. But no amount of sound effects, camera work, gore, ear-shattering screams or cheap, predictable jump scares is going to make me scared, because the tension is already ruined. CGI/puppet monsters are just not that scary to me. What is scary is the unknown. Horror movies usually scare me quite easily, but I wasn't even the slightest bit scared after the movie. That in and of itself should say a lot. The plot is quite standard, predictable horror stuff. The ending is fine, I was kind of indifferent towards it. The film was advertised as a horror film, so that's what I expected it to be - and was disappointed. But I also tried to be merciful to the movie by thinking it as not a horror film, but some kind of "dysfunctional E. T. with gore". But since the movie is using all the horror tropes so blatantly, I could not give it even that. The family drama would be interesting, if they forgot about trying to be horror, and focused on that with some more subtlety. But it's all so in-your-face with these mostly caricature characters and obvious symbolism - a style that I think works better in horror movies, but since this movie fails as a horror movie, all of that just feels like an over-the-top fantasy drama. Which of course would be awesome, but again, the constant horror tropes prevent that from working. There wasn't even a real attempt to make the movie a dark comedy, that could have worked - but for the most part, this film is dead serious. If there is anything positive, I have to give it to the actors, I think they are really doing a good job conveying the members of this twisted family. Especially the work of the actress playing Tinja is close to perfect. All in all, I was actively disliking the film. Giving a 5/10 would mean that I was indifferent towards it, but I was so disappointed, that I have to give it a 4/10, unfortunately. Maybe this movie can be more enjoyable to people that enjoy their scary movies with only jump scares and gore, but I'm not one of them. I hope this is just a start for more high-profile (is this high-profile?) Finnish horror films.

I watched this little gem at my local Independent Theater last night. When the movie ended and people were walking out of the theater, I noticed that at least half of the people had big smiles on their faces, as did I. I was thinking about this movie the rest of the night and the first thing when I woke up this morning. This is such a gutsy movie to have made and I applaud everyone involved.