Motherhood can be… a lot, as both Mary Bronstein’s “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” and Lynne Ramsay’s “Die My Love” reminded us last year. Now, here comes a riposte in the horror genre: Hanna Bergholm‘s Berlinale competition entry “Nightborn,” which brings a Finnish sensibility to a taut and accessible chiller in which babies really can be little monsters.
Seidi Haarla and Rupert Grint play Saga and Jon, a couple moving into a sprawling fixer-upper in the Finnish forest to start the large family of their dreams. There’s economic heft to the otherwise questionable motivations behind this move: As Jon says, “Fuck London,” and it’s true that even if the isolated rural reno project hadn’t belonged to a relative, it could probably be secured for less than the price of a dingy one-bed apartment on the outskirts of the U.K.’s over-priced capital.
When the couple’s baby arrives, it quickly becomes apparent that something isn’t quite right with the little one — at least in his mother’s eyes. Bergholm holds back on showing the audience the infant’s face until the very last moments of the film, a decision designed to tease fans of “Rosemary’s Baby,” and one that resolves with a very sly sense of wit. Played by more than ten babies at various ages, young Kuula is an unusual child, hairy and large for his age, with an early appetite for meat and a curiously harsh quality to his bawling. Bergholm employs some very effective sound design here, giving just a hint of animalistic growling to the kid’s lusty cries.
Throughout its modest runtime, “Nightborn” enjoys skipping across the boundary between metaphor and literalism, and then back again. One sequence sees Saga attempting to breastfeed, only to pull the child away from her chest in a spasm of toe-curling agony. Uh oh: blood. In reality, pain and blood is quite a common experience for new mothers. But you’d never know that from widespread breastfeeding propaganda that seeks to maximize the benefits and minimise the difficulties — and it plays very nicely indeed here as a straightforwardly grotesque horror-movie moment, while also simply reflecting a part of the real world rarely shown onscreen.
Grint is a fine choice for the role of Jon, as his screen persona works well with the character’s schlubby, well-meaning passivity: Isn’t the “Harry Potter” star exactly the right fit for the sort of man who (possibly) gets cucked by an ancient and malevolent spirit of the forest? A scene with Grint doing traditional “here comes the aeroplane” baby-feeding is a highlight, capitalizing on the actor’s ability to play the blindest of blind optimism.
Not to oversell him, however: This is, by some distance, Haarla’s show. That her character is called Saga is a pretty apt bit of nominative determinism: Saga by name, saga by nature. Baby-related trials are heaped upon her with agonizing regularity, and the inadequacy of the other characters’ responses contributes to a sense of gaslighting that almost succeeds in infecting the viewer. Even though you can see it’s not all in her head, it’s disorienting to see everybody else refuse so rigidly to consider that something could really be wrong. But not even a severed finger can jolt Saga’s relatives out of their perception that she’s the problem, not little Kuula.
Contributing to this air of unreality is Kari Kankaanpää’s production design, in which everything feels a little heightened and stylized. Where Rosemary in “Rosemary’s Baby” was trapped by the very normality of her bourgeois Upper West Side surroundings, making it impossible to believe in the devil, here Saga’s entire world seems slightly fantastical. How, then, can you tell the difference between fantasy and reality? When was the last time you saw a barely populated hospital, with nobody in a rush and a new mother given a whole ward to herself? And when was the last time you saw someone actually pushing a traditional Silver Cross Balmoral-style pram, outside of a movie?
Truly bloodthirsty gorehounds may find the ratio of horror to drama to be skewed a little too much toward the latter: Unlike Samantha Eggar’s anger-babies in David Cronenberg’s “The Brood,” this little guy isn’t racking up much in the way of a bodycount, and he’s more cute than scary. Meanwhile, audiences who savoured the gnarly but still very much arthouse world of “Die My Love” may find the more supernatural elements here to be a bridge too far. Still, that leaves a substantial audience who will find much to enjoy in this grisly yet sensitive take on the old maxim that every baby is different.