[Fantasia International Film Festival]: Nightborn

Mother knows best, and there’s no better depiction of this mantra than Hanna Bergholm’s Nightborn which will be having its North American premiere at this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival. The first year of parenthood is a literal circle of hell, with sleepless nights, countless arguments with partners, changing bodies, and edging onto the brink of insanity, and a young couple in Finland are discovering just how difficult raising a newborn can be.

Saga (Seidi Haarla) and Jon (Rupert Grint) are the naive but hopeful parents to newborn baby boy Kuura, who was mysteriously born with a thick covering of body hair and a tail growth. As the pair settle into new parenthood, Saga begins to notice that her bouncing baby boy is not “normal”. He prefers the taste of blood to milk, he growls and grimaces rather than gurgles and giggles, and he has a strange affinity for the trees and earth. As her suspicion and disdain for the child grows, Saga finds herself at odds with both her husband and her family, eventually figuring she must reconnect with her own primal ways in order to become the mother she has always wanted to be. 

Seidi Haarla and Rupert Grint as Saga and Jon

Motherhood can be a right nightmare, and whilst this idea has been explored and portrayed hundreds of times in the horror genre, Bergholm treads a new path into the parental horror theme by incorporating Finnish folklore, and bringing motherhood back to its primal base. Nightborn is caked in fresh earth, but bursting with life, as a woman attempts to navigate her life with a baby that is not what she imagined. Many women experience feelings of detachment or disappointment post-birth, afflicted by post-natal depression, anxiety, and even psychosis. Many feel very little maternal love towards their child, rejecting their child, with a few becoming unable to recognise the baby as theirs. In Nightborn, Saga sees the baby as monstrous, something not of the natural order. Her mothering of the child physically and emotionally drains her, from lack of sleep and damaged breasts, and in no way helped by her over-zealous and boundary overstepping husband Jon. She struggles with not being heard, not being recognised, and not being trusted to parent the baby how she sees fit. 

Seidi Haarla gives an almighty performance as a mother who is attempting to follow her natural instincts that are screaming at her to do the right thing by her child, but is crumbling under the pressure of what kind of mother both society and her immediate family are forcing her to be. It is a primal depiction of motherhood, one which encourages and empowers mothers to reconnect with their rooted nature and the earth in order to find solid ground. Flecked with fairytale imagery, Nightborn is a stark and honest portrayal of the more challenging side of motherhood, and the detriment of not allowing mothers to naturally experience this life-changing new phase. 

5 Screams out of 5