The Exquisite Eeriness of Bird Horrors Part II: 'Hatching' (2022)
Exploring further the themes of Bird Horrors in Hanna Bergholm’s unusual, deliciously gory, coming-of-age creature feature
This is the second installment of a three-part series. Read the first entry here.
Birds ruin everything. Hanna Bergholm’s feature debut, Hatching, makes that clear right at the start. In the opening scene, her camera glides over an idyllic Finnish suburb to the sound of an eerie yet serene humming, accompanying the view of peaceful homes and the artificially created “happy scenes” of an ordinary family. Nothing interrupts tranquillity quite like the intrusive caw of a crow — with which Hatching’s opening credits end to set an ominous tone from the get-go.
The crow in question gets into the home of Tinja (Siiri Solalinna) — a shy, 12-year-old gymnast — and her family, wreaking havoc on the stylish and sumptuous furniture the girl’s control-freak mother (Sophia Heikkila), aiti in Finnish, carefully assembled for their home — or more importantly, for her popular vlog named Lovely Everyday Life. When Tinja catches the bird, aiti asks her to bring it over and smiles while she snaps its neck like a pretzel. Then, she orders her daughter to dump it in the trash outside. The poor thing isn’t dead, though. That night, it begins shrieking in pain, and Tinja follows its voice to the nearby woods to ease and eventually end its suffering. Upon discovering the bird’s nest, she returns home with an egg that she gently nurtures and pays the type of care her mother is incapable of giving her.
Of the three movies I cover in this series, Hatching is the most obvious Bird Horror. The title kinda gives it away, but judging by the first ten minutes I described above, you likely have at least a vague idea of what to expect here. But instead of merely being a typical creature feature with dazzling practical effects, Bergholm turns her horror into a collection of coming-of-age traumas, piercing metaphors, and psychological ambiguity.
As Tinja carefully protects and hatches the egg, she also discovers that her mother is having an affair with the handyman who comes by to repair what the bird ruined. Instead of denying, however, aiti confides in her daughter, off-puttingly admitting to her new love interest and asking the child to keep it a secret. Not that Tinja’s wimp of a father (Jani Volanen) would do much about it, but it’s a heavy burden to lay on any kid — especially a girl who thinks her family couldn't be more perfect.
From that moment, Tinja’s egg grows as rapidly as her guilt. It’s an obvious correlation, but when the giant thing finally hatches, Hatching’s teen phantasmagoria kicks things to the next level. Once the human-sized baby bird monster appears in its all feral and grotesque glory — dragging body horror into the picture — Bergholm’s feature drops its conventional shackles and barges into Bird Horror territory.
The Penetrating Caws of Rage and Guilt
At first, it’s not always clear whether the monster is only a metaphor — solely existing in Tinja’s mind as a response to all the things that start going wrong in her life — or an actual threat to the girl and her surroundings. In an interview with The Guardian, Bergholm said that her film is "really a story of metamorphosis." Despite its metaphorical (and often satirical) undertones, the bird gradually becomes more and more real, eventually turning into a mean and ferocious version of Tinja itself. As opposed to the deceitful Cuckoo People in Vivarium, Hatching essentially reverse-engineers the transformation, showing us all the horrifying and repugnant stages of a bird attempting to be “human.”
It starts with the basics: Tinja buys it food, but the creature rejects it unless it’s eaten by her first, and then vomited back out for the bird to consume it (yes, that’s as nauseating as you imagine). Alli, as Tinja calls it, repeatedly cries for its “mother’s” attention and begins eliminating every threat it deems dangerous to her. The first casualty is “only” a dog from next door (decapitated), but the more Tinja struggles with the unwelcome changes in her life (like her new neighbor friend who becomes her gymnast rival), the more aggressive and vicious Alli becomes.
Its slow transformation into a pseudo-human being isn't traditionally scary per se, but it’s so unusually abhorrent and gross that it makes you wince every time it takes the screen. That’s partly due to Bergholm (and her co-writer Ilja Rautsi) giving Alli human characteristics — like affection and loyalty — to humanize the creature and making Tinja grow closer to it while hiding the beast from her parents like Elliott did in E.T. Another, more technical reason is that the director insisted to mostly use puppetry and practical effects instead of CGI, and animatronics designer Gustav Hoegen’s work is nothing short of a bizarre and menacing spectacle here. Alli’s initial skeletal slimy frame — and later its half-human, half-bird drooling hybrid — is a celebration of remarkable gore craftsmanship that you won’t get out of your head for a while. It’s a sight that creeps under your skin more than you’d like to allow it.
The Horror of a Lovely Everyday Life
Of course, Alli is essentially a manifestation of Tinja’s tween angst and inability to process traumatic changes caused by her diabolical and incessantly selfish mother. She doesn't care how her daughter feels or what she's going through; she only cares how she makes her look to the public and an online audience. To her, Tinja is just another tool to make her Instagram-adjacent blog seem as desirable and envy-inducing as possible. She rides her at practice until her palms bleed because her gymnastic aspirations were destroyed by an injury. She also tells her what to say and do when she's recording content for her blog. Tinja is desperate for her approval, and everything she does is to keep her mom satisfied.
But when aiti leaves her husband and son for the handyman and takes Tinja with her, things quickly spiral out of control. Alli (at this point almost entirely resembling Tinja’s physical appearance) doesn’t take the shame and abuse done to its “mother” lightly, and attempting to kill off everything that makes Tinja suffer is its only defense mechanism (whether that’s a dog, a baby, or a kind adult man, it doesn’t matter). But as an innocent and conscientious girl, Tinja wishes no harm to anyone and tries to stop Alli in every way she can. Ultimately, Alli blows up aiti’s new life and forces her and Tinja to move back home.
Unfortunately, Hatching’s finale is more of a head-scratcher than a satisfying and logical conclusion to everything that precedes it. Though it's uncompromisingly mean and ferociously bonkers — with no easy answers — it's difficult to decode what its message wants to be. On the one hand, it attempts to resolve Tinja’s toxic relationship with his mother, but I’m not sure if it actually succeeds in it. On the other, it leans into its satirical undertones and masterful gore to offer a memorable, if divisive, ending.
Nevertheless, if viewed as a Bird Horror, Hatching is an intriguing, fascinating film I was captured by ever since I first saw it.
Next up: Cuckoo
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I love the duality of how Tinja, as a young girl and gymnast, is supposed to be sweet on the outside but vicious on the inside. When I watched the movie, I wondered why the writer decided to use birds to represent this, but I guess it's because we tend to use birds as symbols of freedom. Light and delicate, they're able to defy gravity and soar in the endless sky above us. We associate that kind of freedom with youth too, yet Tinja is caged by her overbearing mother, both physically in the home and emotionally with the secrets she's forced to keep. There's something profoundly sad in a parent intentionally clipping her child's wings, so to speak.