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***/**** starring Seidi Haarla, Rupert Grint, Pamela Tola, Pirkko Saisio written by Hannah Bergholm, Ilja Rautsi directed by Hannah Bergholm
by Walter Chaw I wanted to like Hannah Bergholm’s crimson-spattered folk horror Nightborn more than I did. It is, after all, the kind of thing I like: a Finnish changeling fable that leans heavily into the Czech otesánek fairytale (memorably immortalized by Jan Švankmajer via his freakout masterpiece Little Otik), with a heavy dose of Rosemary’s Baby to spice the hunter’s stew of it. It joins Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love as another stunning essay on post-partum marriage and navigating the shock and condemnation new mothers face when they don’t behave the way they should, and it boasts a monstrous child who conjures up memories for me of reading Ray Bradbury’s “Small Assassin” as a kid myself. Both Nightborn and Die My Love–not to mention Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You–are portraits of “difficult” women taken for granted, despised and ignored, by the people who should love them most. If Nightborn hums with the same ferocious, infernal energy as those films, it ultimately falls short by not putting enough faith in subtext. Its richness is in the complexity of its metaphor; why not leave it as metaphor? Trust in the audience’s ability to accept ambiguity marks the difference between a neat little exercise and a haunting masterwork.
Saga (Seidi Haarla) is a girlboss taking five years off to renovate a cabin and have three kids with her schlubby, earnestly workaday husband Jon (Rupert Grint). À la Die My Love, they’ve inherited a run-down shack that fast becomes symbolic of their marriage, which is to say in dire need of tending, its foundation cracked and possibly beyond saving. Saga is brusque for a woman, clear about her desires and plans for the future (“I’m taking five years off. We’re going to have three babies”), and only occasionally aware that she needs to put on a softer face for the comfort of others. At one point, she apologizes to her husband for not asking after him more. Given what she’s been going through, it seems absurd she should be worrying about making Jon feel unappreciated. We’ve witnessed Saga’s painful pregnancy, her gruesome delivery, and her inability to bond with her offspring. She’s also torn up the nursery floor around a sapling growing into the room, leaving a yawning hole where she’ll eventually curl up with the child like a thick root around a germinated seed.
Saga doesn’t think the kid, her son, is human. She refers to him as an “it.” “It” rejects Saga’s milk, preferring the blood it draws from his rough nursing instead. She names it “Kuura,” after the Finnish term for the frost that gathers in the pre-dawn chill, and when it cries, the surrounding forest answers with a chorus of unearthly creaks and groans. Saga can only quiet the infant by growling at it. Bergholm makes the decision not to show Kuura’s face, so we can’t identify with it, either. Bronstein did this with the monstrous daughter in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, too, and it’s incredibly effective as a means of denying our suture. It pulls into focus how much the sight of a child triggers a protective instinct towards it. When that’s denied us, all we see is the “unfit” mother’s irritation with it.
Jon and Saga’s friends drift away. Saga is isolated for most of every day. She grows strange. She has terrible dreams of Birnam trees shambling towards the cabin to reclaim their cuckoo. We know Kuura is a kindly one, though, because while holy water doesn’t bother it, iron burns. Watch the sequence where Saga is talked into a girls’ night out and meets a bunch of former underlings for dinner. “We never really knew you,” and, “The guy they got to replace you is really good,” they tell her. Friendly but barbed. Saga grows hives. She steals some meat and rushes home to Kuura, and even though it isn’t hers, it needs her and Saga needs to be needed. Kuura might be the first thing that has ever needed who Saga actually is, not what she’s expected to be. When Nightborn is about Saga feeling seen, except it’s a parasitic spriggan that sees her, it’s incredible.
Bergholm, cinematographer Pietari Peltola, and composer/metalhead cellist Eicca Toppinen create a seething atmosphere alive with the forest’s foul secrets. The production design is spectacular, a perpetual wood even in the interiors, and the film’s colour palette of fungal rot, punctuated by gouts of black, clotted arterial spray, is at once fertile and in a state of rapid decomposition. Nightborn masterfully conveys the terror of the oppressive expectations of motherhood–and the anxiety parents experience when first presented with the prospect of caring for a “different” child, however that difference manifests. The little-known made-for-TV sequel to Rosemary’s Baby was always touching to me, because Rosemary (Patty Duke took over the role) has taken it upon herself to raise her boy, the Antichrist, as though her love could save the world. That’s Nightborn. But then in its last minute or so, the picture makes a decision that honours none of its strengths. Its conclusion feels like it’s anticipating disappointment that we haven’t seen enough of the monster; suddenly, the filmmakers let all the air out of the balloon that’s been inflating for the duration. The afterimage of Nightborn is, sadly, how it loses its nerve. Maybe it never really knew what it was about in the first place.
