The Scandinavian show home breeds monsters in Hanna Bergholm’s pitch-black Jungian fairytale, pungently set in a sunny Finnish suburb of towering pine trees and pristine picture windows. Siiri Solalinna plays Tinja, the henpecked daughter of a ghastly influencer mum, anxiously rehearsing her moves before a gymnastics trial. But Solalinna is also Alli, Tinja’s feral alter ego, who sleeps under the bed, emerging at intervals to terrorise the neighbourhood, variously biting down on local pets and rival gymnasts. Alli, of course, is a manifestation of adolescent rage. The film’s a bloodstained thesis on the divided self.
So what if the psychological subtext is shoved to the fore and shouted loud? Hatching delivers as a straightforward horror as well, in that it’s deliciously repulsive behind the antiseptic facade. Bergholm gives us precision-tooled jump scares and creeping, clammy atmospherics; a malevolent mother and an insurrectionist child. Every unhappy family, Tolstoy said, is unhappy in its own way. This one, for instance, contains crazed crows and dead dogs.
