“What have you done to it? What have you done to its eyes?” The famous scene where Rosemary finally meets her baby in Roman Polanski’s occult chiller becomes a gory feature-length folk tale in Hanna Bergholm’s follow-up to the vastly more surrealist body horror Hatching. Like her previous film, Nightborn is a siren song from under the floorboards and the primal demands of nature, despite our attempts to build on top of them. Unusually, it played in Competition in Berlin, the festival’s recent change of stewardship finally bringing the festival up to date, after even Cannes’ belated acceptance of female-helmed genre.
In both films, home is in the eye of the beholder, and Nightborn begins with Saga (Seidi Haarla) and her husband Jon (Rupert Grint) driving through the forests of Finland. In an America, this would be a cabin-in-the-woods movie, but in Finland there is a whole haunted mansion waiting at the end of the dirt road. Saga used to live there as a child, and the place is falling apart, brimming with weeds that have sprung up through the decking and scrap iron in the yard. It’s definitely a fixer-upper, but Jon is not fazed (“Well, we did want nature nearby”).
Saga and Jon are hoping to start a family and have three children in all, which is perhaps why Saga wants to access her childhood and somehow relive it, if only vicariously. The pair take off into the woods, where faces seem to loom in the trunks of the trees and Saga tells Jon about a local expression: “As you shout, so will the forest answer.” A more literal interpretation would be the folk-horror staple “Be careful what you wish for,” and moments before the couple have sex in the moss, Saga whispers, “Make me a mother.”
Saga’s wish is granted, and in the time it takes for her to give birth, Jon has somehow knocked the place into shape, with an eerie eye for interior design — think Hamnet on acid with tents and teddy bears for the baby’s playroom — that only heightens the film’s strange, disorientating atmosphere.
The first clue that something is wrong comes when Saga goes into labor, an Alien-style explosion of blood and guts that is later (politely) described as “a difficult birth”. The nurse has “never seen such a hairy boy”, Jon makes a fuss of the child’s little vestigial tale, and everyone seems immune to the child’s feral screeching, a wonderfully horrible feat of fingernails-on-a-blackboard sound design that recalls Larry Cohen’s trash masterpiece It’s Alive (1974).
Is Saga going mad? It would seem so, until the couple throw a baby shower and Saga hears what other people are saying. “Why does it look so weird?” asks her young niece. “Babies are usually cute,” notes another guest.
Nevertheless, Bergholm keeps us guessing as to whether or not this is another parental PTSD movie, and it does share some of the paranoid intensity of Lynne Ramsay’s much-misunderstood Cannes entry Die, My Love. Gradually, however, the director circles back to the history of the house, the “junk” in the yard, and the old-wives-tale wisdom of Saga’s superstitious grandma, deemed a dotty old bag by the family. It presages a gloriously grisly final act that proves Saga horribly right whilst at the same time being surprisingly cathartic in a very strange way.
Seidi Haarla is compelling as a woman at her wits’ end, running on fumes, but special mention must go to grown-up Harry Potter star Rupert Grint as the patronizing Jon. His clothing as curated as the film’s meticulously planned set design, Grint exudes the exhausting patience of a man who isn’t really listening, while Pirkko Helena Saisio, as Saga’s no-nonsense mother, brings a new level of ambiguity — is she really the voice of reason, or just RFK Jr. in a trouser suit? Bergholm has a lot of fun with all these elements, and seasoned genre audiences — who are so very well versed in misdirection by now — should too.
Title: Nightborn
Festival: Berlin (Competition)
Director: Hanna Bergholm
Screenwriters: Hanna Bergholm, Ilja Rautsi
Cast: Seidi Haarla, Rupert Grint, Pamela Tola, Pirkko Saisio, Rebecca Lacey
Sales: Goodfellas
Running time: 1 hr 32 mins