THE STORY – With dreams of starting a perfect family, Saga and her British husband Jon move to the isolated house deep in the Finnish forest where Saga spent much of her childhood. But as soon as their baby is born, despite the reassurances of everyone around her, Saga knows something is terribly wrong. As their marriage starts to crack and Jon struggles to support his wife, only Saga suspects the disturbing truth about their newborn child.
THE CAST – Seidi Haarla, Rupert Grint, Pamela Tola, Pirkko Saisio & Rebecca Lacey
THE TEAM – Hanna Bergholm (Director/Writer) & Ilja Rautsi (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 92 Minutes
“Nightborn” is Finnish director Hanna Bergholm’s sophomore feature, returning to the horror genre after 2022’s “Hatching.” The cast is led by “Compartment No. 6” actress Seidi Haarla and “Harry Potter” star Rupert Grint. He should’ve listened to Dumbledore and not gone into the Forbidden Forest because “Nightborn” is an “Evil Dead”-inspired, cabin-in-the-woods horror about the challenges of parenthood turned up to eleven. It’s a gruesome body horror, exploring a mother’s struggles to deal with her odd child who’s literally sucking the life out of her.
Saga (Seidi Haarla) and Jon (Rupert Grint) take over their grandmother’s old home in the middle of an isolated Finnish forest. When they arrive, the house is already ravaged by nature, with trees growing inside and the wooden floor rotting. The at-first gleeful couple is excited to live here and renovate it to their image. The couple head out into the forest and have passionate sex as the forest listens and watches. As Saga screams, she almost invites the forest into their lives.
Cut to the hospital nine months later, and Saga has given birth to a beautiful boy, or so it seems. The newborn is oddly hairy and has a few strange features. Not much of him is shown, but it’s clear that something is not right. Everything goes downhill as Saga struggles to connect to the baby. She fears “It,” as she calls him, drinking her milk as he bites so hard she often bleeds. The baby refuses to eat normal food, so Saga begins to realise what “It” wants: blood and raw meat.
As a horror film, it’s more creepy than actually scary. There are very few jump scares or seriously unnerving moments. Every time the baby is shown, he is almost always silhouetted. This is an effective tool that adds to the tension; as people, we fear what we don’t understand and can’t see. It’s physiological horror mixed with body horror, unafraid to be outrageous and funny, while also getting under your skin in the gory moments. The humour is dark and derives mainly from Saga’s animalistic responses to her child.
Haarla is a great casting as a struggling mother; her face is so expressive and almost frightening at times. She becomes more and more deranged as she stoops to the creepy baby’s level of odd. She barks and screams at the baby after figuring out that it doesn’t respond to normal parenting. Rupert Grint continues his run in genre films since “Harry Potter,” playing a common, helpless father who struggles to see the otherworldly nature of his baby. He never relinquishes his beliefs and remains steadfast in trying to parent him properly. There is a great scene where Grint’s character tries to feed the baby; he says, “Here comes the aeroplane,” and fails to feed him multiple times. Saga gets fed up and says the same line, but slaps a chunk of raw, blood-filled meat on the table, which the nightmare-ish baby eats in an instant.
Opening with POV shots of Saga and Jon’s car entering the Finnish forest, mimicking Sam Raimi’s iconic “Evil Dead” opening, it’s almost as if creatures are following them through the forest. The house is a typical cabin in the woods-style location that is extremely isolated from the outside world. This adds to the claustrophobia of the film as the walls close in on Saga as she begins to lose her mind. That isolation is visualized through the gradual degradation of the house as the camera shots become more off-kilter and less pristine. To begin with, the newly renovated house is rather lush, lit through beautifully white sheers that create a heavenly, soft light. Needless to say, the visual language takes a turn and favours deep shadows to enhance the audience’s paranoia and fear of the monstrous baby.
“Nightborn” is, for the most part, a deranged blast, but it sometimes slips too far into the ridiculous, showing too much and being less ambiguous. It works better when it’s more psychological, forcing the audience to imagine the ghastly face of the creature-like baby and the looming, shadowy presence of the forest. The film will undoubtedly be divisive as it straddles that line between the psychological and the supernatural. Some will wish for less, but others will wish it tapped into the supernatural more. It’s a horror that’s worth seeking out, if not only to see Ron Weasley in the Forbidden Forest.
