What the fuck was this movie.
That's it. That's the review.
Kidding. This movie was a surprise though. Cineworld had put on a 'secret screening' which I decided to go to, the hints given was only that it was a 90 minute horror film. I was wracking my brains trying to figure out what horror could fit the boundary, only for it to turn out to be a Finnish body horror.
Was it a pleasant surprise? Well it was certainly an amusing one. This movie was certainly gory and very creepy, but I just couldn't get past the puppetry. I liked that actually, the fact it brought me well out of the unknown and put me at ease. It spoilt the horror, which I will admit I was grateful for as when I came out it was storming and it was a long dark drive home alone, but it was a very enigmatic tale.
Hatching follows the story of a young girl who is struggling to be what is effectively the perfect daughter. Her mum is an influencer and they live this picture perfect life, so when a bird flies in the living room and breaks all the strategically placed glass, the little girl is forced to watch as her mother kills it rather than lets it go. This bit was hard for me, I hate it when animals are killed in horror movies just for the dramatic effect. I find quite a lot of horrors do this and it is why as I'm older I've strayed from the genre. People fine, animals no.
Anyway, the little girl is woken in the night by the dead bird, it leads her into the woods and is clearly in pain so she kills it again, but an egg pops out as she batters it to death and she decides in order for some sort of redemption from this act she will raise the egg. So she hides it in her room and it feeds off her warmth and then her emotions and tears. Each time it absorbs a little from her it grows bigger until it's literally bulging out of a massive teddy bear.
So this massive egg hatches, out plops this horrific looking bird X human thing. It's all skeletal and feathery but cute in a creepy way. This is the moment I lost the horror aspect and began to enjoy the movie rather than being on edge. I had no idea what I had walked into and had no idea about horror movies from Finland and how far they would go to scare you. But I became comfortable at this point because there were no ghosts or demons there to murder me, just a weird puppet thing. I can live with that.
So she's trying to hide this giant skeletal bird from her family, her bedroom smells like a corpse but she's cuddling up to this thing like a puppy. Then things start getting weird, where she has bonded with this egg it has connected itself to her. Anything that upsets or hurts the little girl upsets or hurts the creature. Only the creature has no restraint and will go out and resolve the issue. We see this first when the girl's sleep is broken by the neighbours dog barking. Guess what happens to the dog. Next at the gymnastics competition, the girl is jealous at her new friends talent as her own mother has placed so much on her to be perfect, at this point the creature has taken on some of the appearance of the girl but with a birdlike face. She mutilates the competition.
Next influ-mum confides in her daughter that she's having an affair. This was a huge thing to confess to your under-age daughter who thought you loved her daddy. The bit of fluff has a baby who mum is besotted with, thus comes the creature fuelled by jealousy. The girl is at her competition when she gets flashes of the creature coming to kill the baby. She has to throw herself off the balance beams to stop it. Remember that connection? The only way to stop 'Ali' as she named the creature is to hurt it/them both.
Ali starts to break away from her ma, they are now identical and as Ali starts hurting people and doing bad things they all think it was the original little girl until she comes in and literally pulls Ali off the influ-mum as she tries to murder her. She explains the sitch, mum understands and says they need to kill Ali. The little girl doesn't have the stomach for this but agrees, I won't spoil the ending but you can probably guess what goes wrong. While it was predictable I approved, that was sort of a happy ending and karma at the same time.
I should probably mention that this film is subtitled. That never bothers me, what did bug me was the fact that the majority of the people in that screening just got up and walked out the second they realised this. If you go to a secret screening then you should be prepared for something out of the ordinary. Don't walk out because you decide you don't wanna watch it, especially if it is foreign film. I love the fact it wasn't English speaking. That really added to the suspense for me and I like that we are finally accepting subtitled movies on our screens. We've got a world of movies we are missing out on. I remember studying foreign film at school and we watched Le Haine. God, I've seen that movie so many times and yet I always notice something new after each watch. That was when I fell in love with subtitled movies and the wider world of cinema. Although, I never watched another movie like that until Parasite.
Hatching is a decent movie. I had never heard of the term 'body horror' until this film, but after watching it I completely understand. This seems like a really bizarre sub-genre but it has the potential to freak you out because of what we naturally know about the human body. We shouldn't be able to see someone twist their head all the way round, we know that is wrong. It works to unsettle us and until right now I never realised how many horror movies use this sub genre. Practically any movie which centers around demons or exorcisms have some aspect of body horror in them to make them horrific.
This film stays with you by the way. I was left thinking about it in the car on the way home still completely in awe over what I had just watched. It was creepy, it had jump scares, it was gory and gross. This is a pretty good build up horror. When I refer to it that way I mean this is something a teenager or maybe a little younger could watch without having nightmares. I don't think it was really any scarier than the original Hocus Pocus movie- now that gave me nightmares when I was a kid. But at the same time I think it could really work as a coming of age movie as it sort of already is. This young girl is struggling with pressures we all relate to at some point and she's channelling this creature who is basically forcing her to overcome these issues quickly and normally or else it is going to do something terrible. I mean it is a funny way to cope but it shows humanity and that is is okay to feel jealousy, just don't murder because of it.
I give Hatching a 6/10. It was a pretty good movie, pretty twisted and had a decent narrative, I just don't condone the murdering of animals as a plot device. It wasn't really scary and I think it would be a good streaming movie going forward.
Well that's me for today folks, see ya next time!
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