Hanna Bergholm maternal folk horror avoids logic and credibility at every turn as it tells of a couple’s attempts to nurture a nightmare child.
The cosy, romantic status quo that hetrosexual couples enjoy in the formative stages of a relationship tends to fall by the wayside when a new child enters the scene. Our bodily chemistry suddenly alters as this bundle of joy must be protected, pandered to and become the centre of all attention, even if it’s driving a giant wedge between mother and father. Finnish genre filmmaker Hanna Bergholm draws on the tensions that come from a baby entering the brood and adds an additional supernatural twist with this bucolic, fitfully-chilling maternal horror story that follows up the director’s 2022 film Hatchling.
Saga (Seidi Haarla) and Jon (Rupert Grint) are middle class urbanites who have decided to decamp to her family plot out in the relative wilderness. They fix up the musty old house, clear out most of the mechanical detritus on the grounds and then choose to celebrate with some impulsive coitus smack dab in the middle of the haunted woodland adjacent to the property. The pair create a magical dream nursery space for the child, with muslin drapes, lots of vintage toys and soft light streaming through billowing curtains. When the little blighter arrives, it transpires that they would have done better to line the crib with razorwire and placed a giant meat hook in the middle of the room.
The film kinda works as a very overstuffed metaphor for post-partum psychosis, as Saga’s maternal instinct kicks in hard and she refuses to see anything problem with the monstrous being she has birthed, even while it bites her nipples till they bleed and she discovers the only thing that can nourish it is raw red meat. Yet absurdity quickly takes over, with all logic tossed out of the window, as Bergholm goes through the motions of forcing conflicts between Saga and Jon, Jon’s religious in-laws, her old work colleagues and the entire medical profession.
Haarla certainly goes full banshee mode with her performance, though it’s very difficult to empathise with her actions as she’s apparently so blinded by awful reality. Grint, meanwhile, doesn’t really pass muster as the concerned salaryman father who just seems to snicker his way through life, and most of the supporting cast are thin stereotypes engineered to upset Saga. As things gravitate towards an inevitable blow-out finale, it becomes increasingly clear that this sorely lacks the wit, sophistication and originality of films such as Rosemary’s Baby or We Need to Talk About Kevin.