A Finnish family’s immaculately kept and ornately styled home and carefully curated social media presence can’t hide the foul secret hidden in their twelve-year-old daughter’s room in this intriguing but too on-the-nose fairytale gone wrong.
In Hatching, a family lives under a strict aesthetic regime imposed by a mommy blogger (Sophia Heikkilä) referred to simply as Äiti—“mother” in Finnish. Äiti is, at best, indifferent to her husband and son, instead choosing to focus most of her energy on her tween daughter Tinja (Siiri Solalinna), brushing her long blonde hair and insisting on perfection at gymnastics practice. One night, Äiti breaks the neck of a crow that disarranges the house during a family photo shoot. As Tinja gingerly carries the dead bird out to the trash, a noise comes from the woods adjacent to the family’s home. There she finds an egg, which she carries back to the house and begins to care for. After it hatches, the pastel dollhouse world built by Äiti begins to crumble.
Hatching examines the impact an image-obsessed mother has on the family around her. Surely there have been perfectionist mothers for millennia, but the mommy blogger takes the dynamic to an entirely different level: constant pressure to present a perfect image not just when out in public but even at home; pressure to impress not just the neighbors but anyone who happens across your profile. No one in the family is untouched; each one serves as a prop for Äiti’s blog. Tinja is the focal point of the film; we sense her quiet, simmering anxiety through her pained facial expressions. The pressures of an overbearing mother are compounded by other preadolescent woes as Äiti sows the seeds of female competition, disordered eating, and perfectionism in her daughter. Though she treats her husband like a doormat, we’re disappointed with him, too, for not doing more to protect his children.
The creature in Hatching is easily understood to represent Tinja’s rage. She cares for, feeds (in an immensely disgusting manner), and nurtures it in a way her mother doesn’t do for her. In response, the creature begins to act on her dark, buried desires. It’s reminiscent of Cronenberg’s 1979 film The Brood, in which a mother births her repressed emotions. The SFX are effective; it’s hard not to be grossed out by this film. However, the creature design falls short; its marble-like eyes are a bit unsettling, but mostly cheesy. Ultimately, though, what weakens the creature the most is that the metaphor is too obvious, making this an easy-to-understand but mentally unengaging watch.
Hatching provides a fairly surface-level look at how obsession with social media image impacts kids in their early teens, compounding the confusion inherent to being young. It’s persuasive enough that we feel for Äiti’s family, and maybe we pity Äiti, too. However, the story is ultimately too flat and simple for it to really feel groundbreaking.