Hatching (2022) Just thinking abou the sheer amount of horror movies available to stream these days exhausts me.
Maybe because this country and the world's going to hell in a hurry accounts for me avoiding most of them. Who needs artificial horrors when you can spend all day on news sites reading about real ones....
I'm willing to sit still for exceptional horror films.....the ones that manage, one way or the other to rise above the crowd, either by their high quality or the sheer outrageousness of their conception....(yes, Megan and Cocaine Bear, I'm talkin' to you....)
Caught wind of this one when I watched director Joe Dante rave about it on 'Trailers From Hell'. And he hit the nail exactly: it's a sick, twisted little dazzler out of Finland.......a freaky fairy tale that toys with multiple psychological metaphors while steeped in old school Cronenberg-ian body horror.
"Hatching" pulls off quite a balancing act.....while all its gruesome twists, and blunt Freud-ian symbolism seem so obvious, director Hanna Bergholm brings these tropes together with some some stunning skilled manipulative artistry.
And the film's determined, startling use of live-on-the-set, practical physical effects gives it an immediate punch-in-the-gut quality. No CGI animated creatures in sight here......we're taken back to the glorious territory of John Carpetenter's "The Thing"..
In dazzling sunlight, we're presented with a perfectly pristine blonde Finnish family. But their dysfunction runs deep. Mom (Sophia Heikkila) is a smiling, self-absorbed horrorshow all to herself, using her family as nothing more than fodder for a popular family'vlog'. The star of her show is tween daughter Tinja (Siiri Solalinna) whom she's relentlessly pushing to become a champion gymnast.
This control-freak, helicopter mom, whose permanent fixed grin conceals her iron will, even cheerfully butters up her daughter when the poor kid catches gets winds of Mom's affair with the hunky handyman.
Mom kills a black crow that had the temerity to crash into one of her vlog sessions, but this screeching, sturdy bird's right out of Poe. It survives long enough to lay an egg, which Tinja finds and keeps dark and warm in her bedroom.
The egg, soon grown to the size of a suitcase, hatches into a spindly, grotesque caricature of a bird. (A wonderful animatronic achievement). Tinja bonds with the creature as if it's an oversized pet, but the thing's really nothing less than evocation of herself. - once out the the bird-chrysalis stage, it transforms into Tinja's doppelganger Id. And this newly born(or hatched) twin is a fierce, feral creature, sharing Tinja's repressed frustrations and rage....and more than willing to wreak bloody hell on those who anger her sister.
Fans of classic films can easily recognize Tinja's plight as no different than Dr. Jeckyll or even Walter Pidgeon's Dr. Morbius of "Forbidden Planet"....haunted and dominated by an uncontrolled alter-ego who mirrors their every subconscious, murderous impulse. Or a viewer can simply enjoy the film as a deeply satirical metaphor for teen angst, female empowerment......or obnoxious, social media influencers getting a long overdue rake-over-the-coals.
Clever, gory and perfectly calibrated, "Hatching" hit the horror sweet spot for me. You can debate among yourselves as to whether it deserves inclusion into that new rarified genre of 'elevated' horror. (Maybe that brilliantly designed, squawking, screaming bird monster disqualifies it, but I loved Birdie dearly....she reminded me of 'The Giant Claw', one of the funniest sci-fi creatures of the 1950's)
Essential, required viewing for avid horror-meisters.....a good egg for sure. 4 stars (****).
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