Hatching (2022)

It’s seems that more and more these days that if a director’s debut is interesting, innovative and critically acclaimed, then naturally they’ll be making the latest Marvel project as part of ‘Phase 403’ (or whatever they’re now on) or indeed a Star Wars film, within a few years. For example Chloe Zhao was barely able to imprint her style onto Marvel’s Eternals (2021) after her Oscar win for Nomadland (2020), and Rian Johnson’s promising debut Brick (2005) seems a long time ago after the dreadfully dull Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017) more recently. Having said that, both Zhao and Johnson both remain fine film makers, so let’s hope Hanna Bergholm isn’t swept up by the franchise heads after this, her superb psychological horror debut. In the opening sequence to Hatching, Tinja, a twelve-year-old budding gymnast witnesses a bird fly into her perfectly kept home as her narcissistic mother is filming her ‘perfect family’ for her blog; a self indulgent piece of dangerous egotism and crassness which is key to the rest of the film. This scene is a metaphor for the film in a nutshell. After this escapade Tinja finds the same wounded bird in the woods that night, and after beating it to death with a rock, takes the one remaining egg from the bird’s nest home to keep it warm in the hope of keeping it alive. Tinja’s own guilt over the bird’s death is set against a guilt to please her mother; her mother already attempted to kill the bird before it seemingly escaped the bin in which Tinja was ordered to place it. It’s no accident that Tinja’s Mum is simply credited as ‘Mother’; for the most part of the film it’s a crudeness that fits well with the gaslighting of her own daughter, in case any affection shown should hinder Mother’s status on social media, or indeed impinge upon her filtered to-within-an-inch-of-its-life online unreality. Such is the narcissism of Mother, when caught with another man by Tinja, she appallingly justifies her infidelity to her daughter with a selfishness bordering on lunacy; essentially saying that “Daddy’s silly and Mummy deserves better, but this should be a nice, fun, secret between Mum and Daughter.” What makes Hatching so unnerving yet gripping is Tinja’s reaction to all of this. The egg she brings from the woods has grown to an enormous size, eventually hatching in the form of a human like bird, which begins to act against everyone (and everything) who seemingly wrongs Tinja. The only way Tinja can feed ‘Alli’, as she coins the bird, (which slowly begins to transform into her doppelganger) is to eat birdseed and then regurgitate it, bringing up themes of bulimia or indeed other eating disorders. To pin the blame on everything bad that happens in Hatching on Mother is tempting, but it’s not solely about her; it’s about Tinja, and this is an important point to make against the very narcissism that Tinja is having to fight. It’s a tricky question; if you’re under this sort of extreme pressure from a narcissist, does focusing on your own well-being and self make you a narcissist yourself? Whether Tinja is fully aware of the meaning of this inner turmoil is unclear, and how much of the film is real or in her head is equally difficult to ascertain. All of this is absolutely vitally apposite in our society of today with self awareness being utterly replaced by self indulgence, and Bergholm has produced something quite magnificent here; a comment upon the problems so many will face without being able to do anything about them, disguised as a quite excellent horror. 8.2/10