A nuclear family in the pristine suburbs of Finland smiles and waves to the camera. They’re held up by the matriarch affectionately known as Mother (Sophia Heikkila) and everything appears to be picture perfect…until a black crow literally swoops in and destroys the happy moment. These are the opening beats of Hanna Bergholm’s Hatching, a story about a young girl named Tinja (Siiri Solalinna) who is so desperately trying to please her Mother by earning a spot in an upcoming gymnastics competition.
Unlike Mother, Tinja is a kind-hearted, honest little girl who only seeks to prove herself to be the perfect child Mother has created for her online followers. However, like any adolescent, Tinja isn’t perfect and fails to earn the approval of her painstakingly overbearing idol. After finding a mysterious egg in the woods, Tinja decides to take it home and hatch it, becoming a mother herself.
The premise for the film hatched in a more unconventional way.
"The idea came from our screenwriter [Ilja Rautsi]," Berholm said. “He called me and said he had this one line, that a boy would hatch a doppelganger out of an egg. I said immediately this sounds like something I would like to do, but I would want the lead character to be a girl. So, I thought if she’s hatching an egg there’s a theme of motherhood and growing up. All the themes came from this one sentence and that’s where we started.”
The entire film is a journey about the fragility of the family unit, but the final act is really where the story shines as Tinja and Mother must find common ground to defeat the malicious doppelgänger.
“In the treatment that we wrote together, there was an ending that was bad,” Berholm continued. “I just left it up to Ilja to write a better one, so when I read the first draft a lot of things just didn’t work and were changed, except for that ending. The ending never changed after that first draft.”
More changes were made to the final cut of Hatching that derived from note sessions about the script. In the original text, there was more context surrounding Tinja’s relationship with her brother and father. However, they were omitted during editing sessions for a few reasons:
Bergolm confidently said, “The mother-daughter relationship in this film was so strong that every time there was a scene with the dad, it didn’t work. In reading it, it worked, but seeing it, it didn’t. So, we cut it!”
When asked what advice she would give her younger filmmaker self, Bergholm said, “I would like to say that it’s important to push the ideas that are close to you and not what you think people want you to make. I would also remind the horror me that by mixing genres you can have some fun with your story.”
Hatching is a master class in not only directing, but also production and makeup design. Horror audiences and filmmakers alike are sure to find the film as entertaining and frightening as I did.
The film will release theatrically on April 29th from IFC Midnight, and on VOD on May 17th.