LIFF Dispatch #3: The Mother-Child Bond Proves Frightful in Finnish Horror Nightborn

NIGHTBORN / Yön Lapsi 

(Hanna Bergholm, Finland/Lithuania/France/UK, 2026, 92 mins)

"Fuck London."--a sentiment a father will come to regret 

A baby is bound to be challenging for any new parents, except the little fellow in Hannah Bergholm's Nightborn, winner of the Cheval Noir--the top prize--at this year's Fantasia International Film Festival, isn't just different, but mysterious and inexplicable, almost like a creature from another planet.

In Bergholm's first feature, Hatching, a preteen gymnast with a tightly-wound mother cares for an egg that hatches into a strange and terrifying creature. She leaned on practical effects, like puppetry and animatronics, for her tactile take on suburban conformity and toxic parenting.

Right: Just a girl and her egg in 2022's Hatching

For her followup, again cowritten with Ilja Rautsi, she switches to English, for the most part, while exploring the mother-child bond from a different angle. She also shifts from the suburbs to the countryside where newlyweds Jon (Harry Potter's Rupert Grint), a British immigrant, and Saga (Seidi Haarla) have arrived to start a family in her ancestral home. 

The cottage may have been beautiful and sturdy in her late grandmother's day, but her mother (Pirkko Saisio), an academic, had no interest in it, and now the floorboards are literally rotting. She and Jon aren't discouraged, though. They'll fix it up and raise three kids, exactly as they had planned. 

After exploring the house, they venture into the woods, where Jon notices that some of the trees have troll-like characteristics and seem to want to trip him up. He's a bit creeped out, but Saga finds it all very literally stimulating, and the next time Bergholm catches up with them, she's in labor. 

Saga gives birth in a bloody spurt, after which the nurses spirit the baby away, and she doesn't understand why. Once she's had her rest, she meets the hairy, cranky, but otherwise healthy child. Bergholm doesn't show its face, so we have to take it on faith that it isn't monstrous. She and Jon proceed to name the little tyke Christian, which seems ironic, but Jon is a vicar's son.  

After the birth, Saga's body starts to change in subtle and disturbing ways, and no matter what she does, Christian responds more positively to Jon. The same is true of her mother, sister, and in-laws, too, though not by much. 

After several painful biting encounters while nursing, Saga comes to find that her offspring prefers blood to milk, but no one believes her. In fact, her nearest and dearest believe that she's the problem, especially her non-nurturing mother and resentful single sister. Others find the aggressive fellow altogether off-putting, which suggests that this isn't a textbook case of post-partum depression or even psychosis, but whenever Saga tries to do non-mommy things, it cries out for her. (She thinks of Christian as more of an "it" than a "he.) She feels like she can't win, because she can't. 

It's only when Saga gives the kid what he wants, that things change. It's just that Christian, whose name she spomtaneously changes to Kuura (Finnish for "Frost") without consulting Jon, doesn't want normal things, driving a wedge between her and her husband as she finally bonds with the weird little being. Her mother and sister claim that she was once a weird little being, too, something Bergholm never explains, other than to suggest that Saga more closely resembles her grandmother.

Suffice to say, Saga's sister was the easy one, whereas Saga was also a difficult child. There are elements of Rosemary's Baby to the scenario, not least when Jon segues from supportive to judgmental, but the baby is neither demonic nor vampiric. I'm not sure exactly how to define it other than as a troll-like manifestation of Saga's fears about motherhood as much as the creature in Hatching was a manifestation of Tinja's repressed anger.

Rupert Grint, who next appears in Ebenezer, is quite good, even if it seems as if he aged into a middle-aged man overnight, since I've seen little of his work since the Ron Weasley days, but that's on me, though he has signed on to play the adult Ron in Broadway's Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. 

Seidi Haarla, however, who first impressed me in Juho Kuosmanen's terrific 2021 two-hander Compartment No. 6, goes for broke in a physically and emotionally demanding role. I couldn't say whether she drew from experience as the mother of three. Or whether Grint, the father of two, did the same.

If anything, Hannah Bergholm's film reminded me of Lynne Ramsay's Die My Darling in that Haarla, like Jennifer Lawrence's character, ends up exposed in every way, snarling and crawling on the floor and doing everything possible to connect with her child. I was also reminded of Mary Bronstein's If I Had Legs I’d Kick You in that Kuura never stops crying, whining, and moaning, and Bergholm waits until the final sequence to show his face in full. 

While Hatching struck me as the more original proposition, Nightborn is well worth a look for anyone interested in Finnish cinema, folk horror, or spooky films about strange kids--and their freaked-out mothers--though pregnant people should think twice before subjecting themselves to Saga's saga.  

   

Nightborn, which is now on Shudder in the States, premieres at LIFF on Oct 9 at Vue West End and plays again on Oct 10 at Prince Charles Cinema and Oct 14 at BFI Southbank, though tickets only remain available for Oct 9. Images from ICF via Moviejawn (Seidi Haarla), CSFD.SK (Haarla and Rupert Grint), Eye for Film (Haarla and Grint), and FirstShowing.Net (Haarla).