Rent Hatching (2022)

Pahanhautoja - Hatching review by NP

This Finnish horror film starts in a world of pure (and slightly nauseating) ‘loveliness’. The unnamed Mother (Sophia Heikkilä), often equipped with a selfie stick on which to record her regular, wholesome vlogs, is the centrepiece of a blissful and well-off family unit. Except things aren’t quite so blissful.

Slowly, director and co-writer Hanna Bergholm (in her debut film) introduces an element of not-quite-rightness in Mother’s manner. Father (Jani Volanen) also extols a sweet tolerance of events that strays into … the unusual. At the centre of it all, daughter Tinja (a remarkable performance from Siiri Solalinna) tolerates it all, together with occasional ritualistic bullying from her (underwritten) brother and the addition to the family of an outsized bird’s egg.

This is when things become stranger still.

I like films that are difficult to define, and this falls into that category, although ‘psychological body horror’ might just cover it. And yet ‘Hatching’ is also enjoyable simply by sitting back and seeing in which direction events turn and how the characters react to them. By the end, things have moved on to the ‘next’ stage of strangeness, but you get the impression it isn’t quite the end of the story. My score is 8 out of 10.