Bold body horror starring Rupert Grint and Seidi Haarla, about a mother who becomes scared of her newborn.
Saga and her British husband Jon move to a house in the Finnish forest to start a family. When their baby is born, Saga instantly feels something is terribly wrong. As their marriage starts to crack, she suspects her newborn is turning on her.
Finnish director Hanna Bergholm follows up her wacky debut Hatching (Club Imagine 2022) with this dark tale of familial dysfunction and matriarchal pressure. Nightborn focuses on the taboo that maternal instincts may not always be a good thing – because what if they point you towards something horrid? Bergholm takes a practical-effects driven body-horror approach (cue physical deformity, biting and blood) as Saga's anxiety is heightened by her family’s dismissal, suggesting her worries are merely a byproduct of sleepless nights. The endless rows of trees and traces of Nordic pagan imagery add to the eerie sense that we can’t even trust those closest to us.
