Nightborn

If horror movies are any indication, probably nothing. Whether it be Rosemary’s Baby or Hereditary, Psycho or The Babadook, everything about the biological imperative — pregnancy, labor, and actually raising a tiny human — has long been depicted onscreen as horrific on both a physical and psychological level. It rewires your brain, transforms your body, and demands that you conform to society’s conception of a good mother. In Finnish co-writer/director Hanna Bergholm’s Nightborn, it also reveals who you truly are — something many of us would rather not find out.

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That includes its fraught heroine. The rare horror movie to premiere in competition at the Berlin Film Festival, Bergholm’s follow-up to her similarly themed Hatching stars Seidi Haarla and Rupert Grint as Saga and Jon, respectively, who quickly learn that they had no idea what to expect while they were expecting. It opens with the happy couple moving into her childhood home in rural Finland, which has been largely reclaimed by the elements: overgrown weeds sprout through the floorboards and water drips through the ceiling of seemingly every room. “Well, we did want nature close by,” Jon says cheerfully while admiring an especially tall plant growing in the living room.

There’s a savage beauty to these wild environs, ditto the film itself in its early goings. Is it merely pareidolia when Jon sees faces, even entire human forms, among the branches and trees, or are the woods more alive than they seem? It depends on how you interpret the Finnish proverb Saga shares with him after a cathartic scream: “As you shout, so will the forest answer.”

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It’s among those trees that they conceive a healthy, if strange, baby born nine months later. He’s large for his age; he’s also...hairy. Very hairy. Saga bleeds the first time she breastfeeds the child, whose nails are sharper than those of most newborns and who always cries when exposed to sunlight — hence why she quickly develops the unfortunate habit of referring to her son as it rather than he.

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She also surprises Jon by announcing in front of her friends and family that their son’s name isn’t Christian, as they’d planned, but Kuura: a Finnish word for “forest” meant to evoke the frost that covers grass and trees on cold mornings. The more she insists there’s something wrong with Kuura, however, the more everyone assumes there’s something wrong with her; nothing she can say or do will convince anyone, especially her husband, of anything other than her own postpartum hysteria. Bergholm and cinematographer Pietari Peltola endear us to Saga’s position by obscuring Kuura’s face until the very end, confining him to the shadows where he feels most comfortable in every other scene.

“As you shout, so will the forest answer.”

Saarla, whose breakthrough came in the excellent, understated Compartment No. 6 a few years back, deftly toes the line between hormones and histrionics. Grint, meanwhile, continues his exploration of genre fare after co-starring in M. Night Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin and the underrated Apple TV series Servant. Not unlike his Hogwarts classmate Daniel Radcliffe, the former child star’s post-Harry Potter output has a side-quest quality that suggests he’s more interested in satisfying his own curiosity than pursuing another mega-franchise. Who can blame him?

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The most memorable character is the one that never speaks but is vibrantly alive in a much more compelling way: nature itself, which surrounds — engulfs, really — its human counterparts. Gusts of wind seem to whisper, trees creak like giants awoken from a long slumber. Bergholm may be more adept at building tension than resolving it, but Nightborn nevertheless proves a creepily effective blend of Finnish folklore and body horror at its most primal. If you shout during an especially frightening scene, it might even answer.