In the fantastical Finnish horror fairytale “Hatching,” the directorial debut of Hannah Bergholm, a young girl hatches a murderous bird monster out of an egg that she secretly nests in her bed, and that’s not even the scariest part — her perfectionist mommy blogger mother strikes the truest terror in the film. Like many great monster movies, “Hatching” uses a monster as a metaphor for repressed emotion, and the creature at the center of this film is one of the most uniquely grotesque creations seen on screen in a long time.
The bird monster is the creation of Gustav Hoegen, a renowned animatronics designer with credits on “Star Wars” and “Jurassic World,” and the spindly, large-eyed, goo-covered creature looks and feels like a throwback to the kind of otherworldly monsters from the best ‘70s and ‘80s fantasy films, like “E.T.” or Jim Henson’s “Labyrinth.” The tender yet treacherous relationship that our young heroine develops with it is also similar.
But where did this mysterious egg come from? Our young heroine Tinja (Siiri Solalinna, in her film debut) finds it in the woods outside of her suburban home after a traumatic incident. After a raven crashes into their picture-perfect house, wreaking havoc, Tinja’s mother (Sophia Heikkilä) kills the bird without batting an eye and instructs her daughter to dispose of it in the trash. But the screams of the reanimated animal summon the girl outside that night. She finishes the job, beating it to a pulp, and assuages her guilt by taking home the large, speckled egg she discovers nearby.
