Nightborn | Director: Hanna Bergholm | ★★☆☆☆
The best horror movies often remind us how incredibly gross it is to be an organic creature. British-Finnish production Nightborn revels in all the terrible functions of the human body: the blood and the guts and the secretions that we pretend are not the very fabric of our being.
The mental veil we drape over our troubling physiology is perhaps at its thinnest when we are making and rearing children: growing them, squeezing them out, suckling them. Ew. Around this theme Nightborn crafts a darkly funny allegory exploring the tribulations of new motherhood, with a particular focus on postnatal depression and postpartum psychosis. (The filmmakers couldn’t have known that the latter would become such an internationally discussed topic thanks to the trial of Lindsay Clancy, but it makes Nightborn feel chillingly relevant.)
We follow young-ish couple Saga and Jon (Seidi Haarla and Rupert Grint) as they arrive in a new home, having relocated from England to a huge, dilapidated house in her native Finland. Like the mansion in Darren Aronofsky’s Mother!, this is not just bricks and mortar – it’s also a metaphor for the mental state of those who reside within it. At first, the couple reclaims the place from a state of nature, replacing the rotten floorboards and cleaving out the tree that grows ominously through what will soon become the nursery. But after Saga conceives their child during a spirited woodland romp, things quickly go south.
The majority of the film charts Saga’s slow, excruciating psychological breakdown, punctuated by moments of gratuitous body horror. As she births their (incredibly hairy) child, Jon’s face is splattered by a geyser of blood; Saga inspects the viscous red material that gathers in her knickers after the traumatic birth; the baby gnaws her nipples until they flow with crimson. This baby is a troll, thinks Saga.
Nightborn director Hanna Bergholm doesn’t quite commit
Nightborn’s biggest achievement is how effectively it places you in the mind of this struggling mother – we share her visceral dislike of her repulsive baby, with its guttural, animal-like cries and its clawed little fingers. Everybody else, however, thinks the baby is fine. A little too hairy, maybe, but mostly fine. So why does it crave human blood, wonders Saga? Why is it walking at six months old? And why does it seem to have a vestigial tail?
Director Hanna Bergholm touches upon many of the same themes as her last movie, Hatching, but Nightborn never quite clicks in the same way. Despite all of the blood and screaming, it’s actually quite… dull. Haarla lets it all hang out – quite literally – with a brave, committed performance but Grint is resolutely boring as her hapless husband, never shifting gear from a cliched portrayal of a Crap New Dad.
Scenes in which Saga and Jon invite their respective parents to the house, or when she dares to venture out without her hirsute offspring, offer a reprise from the claustrophobic hostility, albeit replacing it with a world of patronising platitudes that are as unwelcome to her as the relentless midnight cries.
There are also occasional glimpses of the more straightforward folk horror Nightborn could have been – often in the depictions of the baby itself but also in the anthropomorphic trees that surround this cursed house – but Bergholm seems unwilling to fully commit, instead leaving us alone for minutes at a time with a screaming infant, which isn’t much fun at all.