It is difficult not to be impressed by the offbeat qualities of Finnish horror film “Hatching”. Besides several memorably gruesome moments of body horror to be admired for the considerable skills and efforts behind them, the movie mostly works mainly because of its increasingly unnerving mood coupled with interesting subjects including dysfunctional mother and daughter relationship, and that is enough for compensating its several notable weak aspects.

The movie opens with the banally wholesome introduction of a young girl named Tinja (Siiri Solalinna) and her suburban family by her mother, who is incidentally your average social media influencer. Inside their glaringly artificial domestic environment filled with lots of shiny and glassy stuffs, Tinja’s mother cheerfully presents her and her family in front of her smartphone, and her husband and their children go along with that without much complaint – until a crow suddenly enters their home and then spoils everything as flying to here and there inside their house.

Anyway, Tinja manages to catch this bird in the end. When she gives it to her mother, her mother snaps its neck without any hesitation to the little shock of Tinja, and then she tells her daughter to take the dead bird to a trashcan outside their house. During the following night, Tinja wakes up to have a rather horrific experience involved with that dead bird outside the house, and then she takes a little egg to her house after noticing it at the spot.

Of course, it turns out that this egg is not just a normal bird egg at all. As Tinja takes care of it in her bedroom, it grows much bigger than before, and there eventually comes the moment of, yes, hatching. While quite surprised by what comes out of the egg, Tinja decides to take care of this supposedly avian creature, and she even names it “Alli”.

After that narrative point, the screenplay by Ilja Rautsi alternates between Tinja’s handling of this creature and her increasingly exasperating relationship with her mother. For boosting her online image further, Tinja’s mother wants her daughter to excel herself more at the following gymnastics competition, and that certainly pressures Tinja a lot – especially when a nice girl who recently moved in the house right next to Tinja’s turns out to be a serious competitor for Tinja.

Tinja gets some consolation from taking care of Alli as much as possible, but it also seems that her negative feelings seem to be channeling into Alli. As time goes by, Alli resembles Tinja more and more, and Tinja and Alli even form a sort of psychic link between them. Whenever Tinja gets asleep, Alli is driven by all the anger and frustration repressed inside Tinja, and the following consequences are not so pretty to say the least.

When Tinja comes to realize what is going on, she is naturally quite horrified, but she also becomes very conflicted about how she should handle her situation. When she and her mother happen to spend several days at the house of her mother’s lover, Alli naturally follows her as expected, and Tinja is nervous about what may happen to her mother’s lover, who turns out to be a pretty nice and considerate guy.

In the meantime, the movie keeps serving us a series of disturbing moments, some of which will make you wince for good reasons. I cringed as watching how Tinja feeds Alli like its mother bird, and I was also unnerved a lot by when Tinja must make a choice immediately due to the next horrible thing to be committed by Alli in the middle of what may be a very important moment for her and her mother.

Around that narrative point, the movie stumbles more than once as struggling to balance itself between the two problematic relationships at the center of the story. In addition, many of other characters in the story besides Tinja and her mother are not particularly developed well, and Tinja’s father and son are almost non-existent even during the climactic part where Tinja and her mother somehow come to stick together in front of their little domestic problem.

Nevertheless, the movie remains fairy engaging thanks to director Hanna Bergholm’s competent direction. She and her crew members including did a skillful job of maintaining the eerie ambience on the screen from the beginning to the end, and the special mention goes to the crew members of the special effects and make-up department. Although the production budget of the film is modest, the overall result is pretty impressive on the screen, and young performer Siiri Solalinna is convincing as ably going back and forth between her two roles later in the movie. On the other hand, Sophia Heikkilä is utterly uncompromising in depicting all the toxic sides of Tinja’s mother, and it is a shame that the movie does not delve further into the dysfunctional relationship between her character and Tinja.

“Hatching” is incidentally Bergholm’s first feature film, and she demonstrates here that she is a good filmmaker who knows how to attract and then engage us. Sure, the movie is not entirely without flaws, but it is still a solid genre film packed with a number of strong points, and it will be interesting to see what may come next from her in the future.