***/****
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.