Motherhood can be\u2026 a lot, as both Mary Bronstein\u2019s \u201cIf I Had Legs I\u2019d Kick You\u201d and Lynne Ramsay\u2019s \u201cDie My Love\u201d reminded us last year. Now, here comes a riposte in the horror genre: Hanna Bergholm\u2018s Berlinale competition entry \u201cNightborn,\u201d which brings a Finnish sensibility to a taut and accessible chiller in which babies really can be little monsters.<\/p>\n
Seidi Haarla and Rupert Grint play Saga and Jon, a couple moving into a sprawling fixer-upper in the Finnish forest to start the large family of their dreams. There\u2019s economic heft to the otherwise questionable motivations behind this move: As Jon says, \u201cFuck London,\u201d and it\u2019s true that even if the isolated rural reno project hadn\u2019t belonged to a relative, it could probably be secured for less than the price of a dingy one-bed apartment on the outskirts of the U.K.\u2019s over-priced capital.<\/p>\n
When the couple\u2019s baby arrives, it quickly becomes apparent that something isn\u2019t quite right with the little one \u2014 at least in his mother\u2019s eyes. Bergholm holds back on showing the audience the infant\u2019s face until the very last moments of the film, a decision designed to tease fans of \u201cRosemary\u2019s Baby,\u201d and one that resolves with a very sly sense of wit. Played by more than ten babies at various ages, young Kuula is an unusual child, hairy and large for his age, with an early appetite for meat and a curiously harsh quality to his bawling. Bergholm employs some very effective sound design here, giving just a hint of animalistic growling to the kid\u2019s lusty cries.<\/p>\n
Throughout its modest runtime, \u201cNightborn\u201d enjoys skipping across the boundary between metaphor and literalism, and then back again. One sequence sees Saga attempting to breastfeed, only to pull the child away from her chest in a spasm of toe-curling agony. Uh oh: blood. In reality, pain and blood is quite a common experience for new mothers. But you\u2019d never know that from widespread breastfeeding propaganda that seeks to maximize the benefits and minimise the difficulties \u2014 and it plays very nicely indeed here as a straightforwardly grotesque horror-movie moment, while also simply reflecting a part of the real world rarely shown onscreen.<\/p>\n
Grint is a fine choice for the role of Jon, as his screen persona works well with the character\u2019s schlubby, well-meaning passivity: Isn\u2019t the \u201cHarry Potter\u201d star exactly the right fit for the sort of man who (possibly) gets cucked by an ancient and malevolent spirit of the forest? A scene with Grint doing traditional \u201chere comes the aeroplane\u201d baby-feeding is a highlight, capitalizing on the actor\u2019s ability to play the blindest of blind optimism.<\/p>\n
Not to oversell him, however: This is, by some distance, Haarla\u2019s show. That her character is called Saga is a pretty apt bit of nominative determinism: Saga by name, saga by nature. Baby-related trials are heaped upon her with agonizing regularity, and the inadequacy of the other characters\u2019 responses contributes to a sense of gaslighting that almost succeeds in infecting the viewer. Even though you can see it\u2019s not all in her head, it\u2019s disorienting to see everybody else refuse so rigidly to consider that something could really be wrong. But not even a severed finger can jolt Saga\u2019s relatives out of their perception that she\u2019s the problem, not little Kuula.<\/p>\n
Contributing to this air of unreality is Kari Kankaanp\u00e4\u00e4\u2019s production design, in which everything feels a little heightened and stylized. Where Rosemary in \u201cRosemary\u2019s Baby\u201d was trapped by the very normality of her bourgeois Upper West Side surroundings, making it impossible to believe in the devil, here Saga\u2019s entire world seems slightly fantastical. How, then, can you tell the difference between fantasy and reality? When was the last time you saw a barely populated hospital, with nobody in a rush and a new mother given a whole ward to herself? And when was the last time you saw someone actually pushing a traditional Silver Cross Balmoral-style pram, outside of a movie?<\/p>\n
Truly bloodthirsty gorehounds may find the ratio of horror to drama to be skewed a little too much toward the latter: Unlike Samantha Eggar\u2019s anger-babies in David Cronenberg\u2019s \u201cThe Brood,\u201d this little guy isn\u2019t racking up much in the way of a bodycount, and he\u2019s more cute than scary. Meanwhile, audiences who savoured the gnarly but still very much arthouse world of \u201cDie My Love\u201d may find the more supernatural elements here to be a bridge too far. Still, that leaves a substantial audience who will find much to enjoy in this grisly yet sensitive take on the old maxim that every baby is different.<\/p>\n
Source: RhinoEasy News<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Motherhood can be\u2026 a lot, as both Mary Bronstein\u2019s \u201cIf I Had Legs I\u2019d Kick You\u201d and Lynne Ramsay\u2019s \u201cDie<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1678,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1679","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1679","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1679"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1679\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1678"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}