Hatching Movie Explained- A Disturbing Body Horror Fable Born From Repression And Abuse

The brutal Finnish dark fairy tale is unexpectedly arresting. That is largely due to a disgusting creature and a talented cast. Body horror is particularly personal because it is so easy to relate to what is happening. Our ability to sympathize makes us susceptible to internalization. Intimacy breeds fear. IFC’s Hatching is a deceptively affecting film that sneaks up on you. Like the characters, it presents as an ultra-feminine and strangely sunny story but is something much darker. It is the kind of movie that combines the grotesque with the beautiful and verges on repulsive if it wasn’t so heartbreakingly sad.

Hatching is about accepting oneself, warts and all. It is also about the pressure to be perfect and be unconditionally loved while maturing into something that can sometimes feel as alien and hideous as a violent beast. Tinja, Siiri Solalinna, in her first feature appearance, is a young gymnast who is desperate to earn her demanding mother’s approval. Her icy mother, Äiti(Sophia Heikkilä), is the very picture of female aggression. She runs a lifestyle blog where she presents herself and her family as the ideal unit. Her house is perfectly decorated and kept, and her family is supposed to be the flawlessly styled props in this artificial world. When Tinja begins breaking under the pressure of her mother’s exacting expectations, her collapsing family, and puberty, something unexpected manifests from an egg.

Tinja adopts an egg she found in the woods near her home. She brings it home and incubates it. What hatches shocks her and defies reality. As Tinja’s body transitions and her mind rebels, the creature grows and changes until it can’t be controlled anymore.

The creature in Hatching is disgusting. It is caked in mud, blood, spit, and other human liquids that ooze off the screen, making you feel dirty just watching. Creature designer Gustav Hoegen and special effects makeup supervisor Conor O’Sullivan invented a giant bird hybrid that evolves into something sometimes simultaneously repulsive and beautiful as the film progresses. Equally hard to watch is the small cast who makes the most of brittle smiles, pained glances, and determined stares. These are broken people hiding behind the mask of pleasantness.

Nothing is as it seems in Tinja’s life. Although her mother paints a pretty picture, Tinja can’t live up to her mother’s extreme standards. Instead of being allowed to play and enjoy her childhood, she is isolated from her peers and worked tirelessly. Her mother dotes on her at a surface level, ensuring that she is handed a brittle barb for every affectionate smile. Love comes at a price in Tinja’s house. She is expected to practice until she literally bleeds to ensure competitive superiority while her brother is ignored and her father is browbeaten into dismal acceptance. Tinja’s mother even moves in with another man, and her father casually accepts her infidelity. It’s bizarre and confusing for a girl who is just beginning to grow up and realize how dysfunctional her family is.

Everything you need to know about Tinja’s mom is in the first moments of Hatching. She is a toxic perfectionist who wouldn’t know what love was if it ran her over. When a bird accidentally gets into their house and breaks things, Tinja manages to capture it gently. Her mother asks for the bird, presumably to release it outside but instead breaks its neck while pleasantly smiling at Tinja. This is who Tinja’s mother is. She is compassionless, unfeeling, and harsh. Her refusal to accept Tinja and her selfish behavior are destroying Tinja and her family.

Hatching is about repression and acceptance.

Tinja’s bird monster is gross because our emotions are often gross. We can try to dress them up and hide them away, but eventually, they will come pouring out, usually at inopportune times. Puberty is the same way. It can make you feel like something strange and forbidden is living in your body. Raging hormones cause the body to develop in unusual ways, making us stink and develop in ways we never anticipated. It can also make those pesky emotions a lot stronger. For Tinja, all of that is happening while in the middle of the collapse of her family and in the throes of a full-blown eating disorder. Director Hanna Berholm never lets us forget that although Tinja is feeding her bird baby vomit, she is doing so because she is struggling.

It’s hard to watch partly because vomit is gross but also because you can never entirely distance yourself from the slime and the ooze, especially when the bird starts evolving into something very human. The more Tinja’s bird changes so does her self image. Like most young people, she doesn’t know who she wants to be yet. She is developing her identity in a very real way, and her mother is losing control even if she doesn’t know it yet.

What is clear, Tinja has no desire to treat her offspring like her mother treats her. Tinja’s bird creature may be monstrous, but her mother is a monster. As she nurtures and cares for the creature, it begins to exhibit her physicality, if not her movement. In a real sense, it resembles its mother. That doesn’t mean Tinja or anyone for that matter can control it, though. The more Äiti pushes, the less control Tinja has over her bird baby until she loses all control, and the bird emerges a fully fleshed being with her own ideas about her life. Adolescent rebellion has come home to roost, and Äiti is left wondering how she will cope with this new person. Growing up is like that. It is painful, and try as parents might, they can’t always control who or what their children become.

The moral of Hatching is to embrace yourself and your children. Rigid and superficial ideals are meaningless. They are false idols paved in the crushed psyches of those who devote their lives to worrying about what others think. Like the clever and gory Sissy, which premiered at SXSW, the dark side of social media can reduce a damaged mind to want and need as opposed to joy and contentment. The themes in Hatching are familiar, but the unique creature makes this a good watch. You can stream it on VUDU right now.