Nightborn
It is the wrong decision made for the right reasons, Saga and Jon choosing to raise their baby in the Finnish woods, the house where her grandmother lived and died now beyond what might be optimistically termed a “fixer-upper” and requiring major restoration before it is liveable, yet here they are, the road passing deep into the forest beyond civilisation and the grounds filled with rusting farm equipment, the trees beyond forbidden to Saga when visiting as a child.
The difficult birth leading to difficulty bonding, perhaps an echo of her distant relationship with her own mother who placed career above family and emigrated to America, Saga chooses the name Kuura for the healthy but hairy baby without discussing it with Jon who had expected something more traditional, mother now feeling judged by visitors with their perfect offspring, convinced something is wrong with either her or her child.
Her debut feature Hatching having explored a family disrupted by a strange arrival, so does director Hanna Bergholm continue dissecting parental discontent and disappointment in Nightborn (Yön lapsi, more literally Child of the Night), starring Seidi Haarla as Saga, literally chewed up by the experience of motherhood, and Rupert Grint as Jon, with infuriating best intentions micromanaging and mansplaining.
The house less a home than an ecosystem which will not be quelled, vegetation in the hallway and a sapling growing from the living room floor, perhaps an envoy of the trees of the damp and mossy forest with distinct personality in their gnarly shapes and knots, screaming and unable to settle with only the sound of the wind calming him (the growls of the forest voiced by Sepultura’s Max Cavalera), Kuura is alarmingly strong and advanced for his age but uncommunicative.
Refusing to feed and burned by sunlight and iron, traditional defence against supernatural evil, Kuura’s strange behaviour pushes Saga to her own extremes of behaviour, refusing to listen to reason or trust anyone around her, but in the annals of baby horror Nightborn is adequate rather than a classic, co-written with Ilja Rautsi but heavy-handed, moving slowly and the obligations of filming with infants meaning it is apparent when the actors are delicately handling a dummy.
Jon a hollow character, deep in denial where his wife knows from the start that they are raising a monster, Grint adds little other than name recognition to make Nightborn a more commercial proposition to the detriment of the film which would have been stronger had been unreserved on the horror rather than playing it safe, the farcical elements an uneasy fit with the otherwise realist drama of post-natal depression and the creature Saga is reluctantly compelled to protect.
Nightborn will be released in UK and Irish cinemas from Friday 30th October
