Intensity 🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Directed by Hanna Bergholm.
As Lennon/McCartney — yes, that Lennon/McCartney — once famously opined “Though she was born a long long time ago, your mother should know.” As we all know have come to realize, this sentiment is wildly true and wholly inaccurate all at the same time.
Sometimes mothers have their children’s best interests at heart. Sometimes this is a purely hateful and resent-filled relationship. And sometimes it’s a work in progress. Mind you, mothers are trying their best, but often the strange and oedipal relationship with the children can fray the rearing process.
Like all parents, Saga (Seidi Haarla) and Jon (Rupert Grint) are deeply in love — at the start. They desire to create the perfect nuclear family in a remote wooded area in Finland. The property has been owned by Saga’s family for time immemorial.
As Jon and Saga start down the parenting path it becomes clear that Saga is an aberrant product of the woods and their offspring might just be as well. Their child is eventually brought into the world and “it” (as Saga non-affectionately refers to the baby boy) is different. Way different.
Covered in werewolf-like hair, replete with dark pointy nails, “it”, or as he’s later known, Kuura, is a peculiar baby for sure. Amazingly, Kuura is played by 14 different children throughout his early adolescence. It’s clear that both Kuura and Saga don’t want to be indoors. The woods calls their name literally and figuratively. Nature is their nurture and neither will be satiated by the bumbling father figure, Jon.
As Saga’s behavior becomes increasingly strange and distant, director Hanna Bergholm begins to pick apart at the feeble psyche of both mom and dad by posing series of parenting questions that plague all new parents. Is my child normal? Really normal? How is it possible that we created this other being? And most importantly, do I love the child and does it love me?
These are the questions that lie at the core of Nightborn. Both Saga and Jon answer them in their own ways and some of their responses make sense and others don’t. But that’s what parenting is often about — the smorgasbord approach. Trying things out and hoping that the familial decision-making pays off in the long run.
That said, most parents don’t have to simultaneously contend with a demon baby, mystical woodland creatures, and a marriage in taters.
Should you see Nightborn?
Director Hanna Bergholm who previously took a stab at the mother/child relationship in 2022’s Hatching, really does a wonderful job at further refining the tenuous relationship that parents face with a newborn. That said, the film does fall somewhat short in proffering any truly new ideas or pointed insights into this frayed dynamic.
Also somewhat frustrating is the fact that Bergholm only lightly alludes to the mythos around the family’s ties to this Finnish property and that the grandmother may/may not have been complicit in these woodland escapades.
The film finishes in somewhat predictable, yet hopeful, way involving a reconciliation between mother, child, and nature. Dad is out of the picture and it’s up to Saga and Kuura to carry on as stewards of this forested family fortune.
The most compelling reason to see Nightborn firmly lies with actress Seidi Haarla as Saga. She perfectly embodies the tortured nature of parenting, the psychical toll that birthing requires of a mother, and the loneliness that new mothers often experience.
If you’re a new parent, or on the verge of becoming a parent, then stay away from Nightborn — it truly is terrifying. Otherwise, go ask your mother. She should know.
Nightborn is currently streaming on Shudder.