Scrambling creature feature with psycho-horror, this inventive oddity brings tween anxieties to monstrous life.
Painted in gumdrop colors and faux good cheer, Hanna Bergholm’s “Hatching,” set in a leafy Finnish suburb, is a nightmare of puberty and poor parenting. Suffering from both is Tinja (a wonderful Siiri Solalinna), a 12-year-old gymnast and resentful collaborator in the manufactured perfection of “Lovely Everyday Life,” a relentlessly upbeat video blog maintained by her controlling, unnamed mother (Sophia Heikkila).
When a frantic crow interrupts an afternoon’s filming — and destroys the family’s screamingly pink-patterned living-room — Mother reacts by swiftly snapping its neck. This sharp swerve from serene to shocking will recur throughout the film as Tinja, a milky mist gathering ominously behind her, finds an abandoned egg in the dead bird’s nest and hides it in her bedroom. It will grow startlingly large, finally hatching, tellingly, at the touch of her tears.
What emerges is a freakish, gooey-feathered monstrosity, its pleading eyes and spindly legs in comical contrast to its ferociously-toothed beak. The disgusting creature’s devotion to Tinja, however, fills an emotional void in the needy girl, seeming to intuit — and, eventually, act on — her deepest anxieties. In the process, the beast becomes the physical manifestation of Tinja’s suppressed fury, an evil twin determined to bloodily erase every obstacle in the girl’s path to happiness.
A sometimes uneasy merger of monster movie and psychological horror — with a dollop of social-media satire — this inventive first feature mines tween confusion (there are nods to both bulimia and menstruation) for grotesque fun. The film’s humor, however, doesn’t dilute the essential sadness at its core: that of a lonely girl so lacking a source of love that she’s forced to create her own.
Hatching
Not rated. In Finnish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. In theaters.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
