Bergholm clearly revels in misdirection, and her eye for horror that makes the audience squirm is without doubt Nightborn’s biggest strength, as it plays at the BFI London Film Festival. But is that enough to leave you satisfied?
Over the past few years, we have seen a host of films tackle the challenging and far too often-ignored subject of postpartum depression. These movies, like Lynne Ramsey’s powerful Die My Love, have challenged taboos and raised awareness of the condition’s horrors and its effects on the mother, partner, and child. Hanna Bergholm’s follow-up to the surrealist body horror Hatching (2022) also focuses on the horrors of postpartum depression. Still, unlike Die My Love, horror is the key word in Nightborn’s gruesome tale, as Bergholm keeps us guessing about what’s really unfolding on screen.
Saga (Seidi Haarla) and her husband Jon (Rupert Grint) are a loving couple looking to settle down in the forests of Finland, where Saga’s grandmother’s home now lies dilapidated and in urgent need of repair. It’s the kind of fixer-upper most people would run a mile from, but for Saga, the memories of her time there with her sister are so happy and magical that she can’t imagine a better place to raise the three kids she and Jon plan to have.
The house sits on the doorstep of Finland’s deep forests – forests that are also steeped in mythology and folklore. As Jon and Saga explore the damp, dense forest outside their new home, the trees seem alive to their presence, and it’s not long before their first child is conceived on a mossy bank under the branches of an ancient tree. But who does this child truly belong to? Saga and Jon or the forest?
When Saga goes into labour early, the first sign that something might be wrong cuts through what should be a celebration of new life. In a scene reminiscent of Ridley Scott’s Alien, the child bursts forth, showering everyone with blood; its body is covered in hair, and its weight is far greater than a child born early should be. Even the nurse seems surprised by the new boy’s hairiness. But it’s the boy’s incessant screeching that sends a chill through the audience, a screeching that immediately leads Saga to believe it to be a thing, not a child.
Things don’t get any better when Saga returns home. She can’t bond with the ‘thing’ she gave birth to; it sucks her blood, not the milk from her breasts, and it grunts and breathes like a pig lying in its pen. It seems to hate light as it gurgles and screeches. Yet for Jon, their child simply needs its mother’s love. At the baby shower, Saga is paranoid about people seeing this ugly monster as she overhears people in the crowd say, “It looks weird?” and “Why isn’t it cute?”
Is Saga slowly vanishing into a psychosis, or is the child a mythological creature of the woods? Is Nightborn a twisted homage to Rosemary’s Baby, or a film exploring the abject horror of postpartum depression? Most directors would leave us with a clear sense of one or the other, but not Bergholm.
As Nightborn reaches its grisly final act, Bergholm leaves us guessing as to whether Saga was right about the child being a creature of the forest or whether we have just witnessed her psychosis forever destroy the family she longed to create. Nightborn is designed to subvert audience expectations, spark debate, generate nervous laughter and leave us wincing, and it does all four to spectacular effect.
Seidi Haarla’s performance is riveting, disturbing, and compelling, alongside Grint’s ever-more-worried Jon, who wants to maintain the happy home but doesn’t know where to turn in making that a reality. Still, for all these strengths, Nightborn’s unwillingness to define its key messages will leave many audience members cold as the credits roll, even if they enjoyed the horror rollercoaster the film offers.
Bergholm clearly revels in misdirection, and her eye for horror that makes the audience squirm is without doubt Nightborn’s biggest strength. But is that enough to leave you satisfied?
Despite its strengths, Nightborn’s inability to forge a clear path becomes somewhat tedious as the final act approaches. Much of this stems from Nightborn’s attempt to appeal to two groups of horror fans: those who love social realism and those who like gore and shocks. The result is a movie that never quite decides which side of the fence it’s ultimately on, and, as a result, risks losing both groups by the final act.
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