Full-frontal close-ups of babies crowning their way out of the womb have become unexpectedly commonplace since “Knocked Up” popularized the trend some 20 years ago. While these images evoke a measure of body horror, none of them could hope to compete with the gore-mad giddiness of the money shot from the first act of Hanna Bergholm’s “Nightborn.”
Not only does the infant erupt from between its mother’s legs with the force of a cannonball, but the blood that comes out with it splashes onto the baby daddy’s rictus grin as if his wife had just given birth to a giant squib. That said baby daddy is played by Rupert Grint further enhances the scene’s comic exaggeration; while the actor has become a familiar sight to horror fans since graduating from Hogwarts, the smile he maintains in the face of this nightmare reeks of Ron Weasley in a way that can’t help but heighten the wrongness on display. Having children is not for the faint of heart, “Nightborn” wants you to know, and motherhood can be a Shudder-worthy ordeal even when you don’t give birth to a hairy growling demon spawn who chews through its mama’s nipples so that it can feed on her blood instead. But the experience that Bergholm and Ilja Rautsi have scripted for Jon and Saga (Seidi Haarla) to enjoy is a long, long fucking way from normal.
Just how long? Well, that, at its essence, is what this new genre exercise from the director of “Hatching” is determined to figure out for itself. More primal than scary even before it settles into the sheer tedium of raising a newborn, “Nightborn” is consciously — if not satisfyingly — ambivalent as to what kind of horror movie it might be in the end. Despite a few early moments of CGI-enhanced carnage that seem to anticipate a straightforward thrill-ride (e.g., the baby reaches up and rips its grandmother’s hoop earring right out of her flesh), Bergholm’s focus soon begins to cheat a bit closer to the everyday exasperation of “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” than the progeny from hell mishegoss of “Rosemary’s Baby.” “Nightborn” is ultimately less interested in framing motherhood as a horror movie than it is in exploring why people refuse to see it that way.
Which isn’t to suggest that it’s not interested in framing motherhood as a horror movie. “Nightborn” opens with Jon and Saga moving back to the latter’s childhood home deep in the forests of Finland, a rotten husk of a house that appears to have been abandoned rather than rented out or resold. Jon is a ginger Englishman who doesn’t speak a lick of the local tongue, but he and his wife are so high on their shared plan — three babies in the next five years, all of them raised in this fable-like idyll — that he doesn’t have any qualms about living as a foreigner in the middle of nowhere. The mere thought of being parents together literally inspires them to waltz around the termite nest they’ll soon refurbish into a rustic kitchen. “Make me a mother,” Saga demands as she walks through the woods with her husband, and Jon does what he’s told right then and there. That is, if we can assume Saga was speaking to Jon, and not, say, one of the creepy faces in the trees.
Delivering that first child has a funny way of making Saga reconsider their plan to have two more, even though Jon — who’s often out of the house for work, and whose inability to communicate with the doctors anticipates how poorly he’ll be able to understand his wife’s experience as a mother — is undeterred. The baby rips open Saga’s vagina, chews her breasts into mangled lumps, and leaves her so weak in general that she has to start using a walker.
And what does she get for her sacrifice? A werewolf-like imp who grunts at her like a creature from Middle-earth and cries every time she comes near. “Does it look like a Christian to you?” Jon asks, suggesting a name and/or laying the groundwork for his priest father to come and bless the child. Saga unilaterally chooses to go with “Kuura,” a name that’s whispered to her in the wind.
There isn’t a whole lot of milk to squeeze from the story of a hairy infant who thirsts for blood, and so “Nightborn” starts to lean into the idea that every new mother feels like they’re being sucked dry by the mewling little creatures that come out of their bodies. Of course, Saga is actually living the nightmare her experience is meant to represent as a metaphor, which turns the movie’s premise into a “yes, and” situation that lets Bergholm get messy with the space between the expectations and realities of having a baby.
The Scandinavian people in Saga’s life, including her tough-as-nails mother and her radiant sister (the type who makes everything look easy, including motherhood), refuse to accept that something is off about Kuura, even though the infant’s biblical allergy to purified metal would seem to be one of several dead giveaways. Yes, everyone feels like they’re always doing the wrong thing with their kids. Everyone feels like they’re having a harder time of it than they’d care to admit. Everyone feels like they’re dehumanized by the process in a way that leads them to suspect there’s something monstrous about the whole endeavor. Nobody is allowed to feel like that’s normal, which means that nobody, not even Kuura’s father, is willing to concede when it’s not.
“Nightborn” is incredibly straightforward on a scene-by-scene basis, as Kuura’s strangeness grows worse and worse as Saga reckons with the toll that it’s taking on her body. The self-imposed need to keep this story suspended between metaphor and reality seems to handcuff Bergholm to an unhelpful degree, even if parenthood itself often seems to be suspended between those two dimensions in much the same way, and even if Haarla — who throws herself into her role with raw and bleeding maternal force — is able to play both of those sides at once. (For his part, Grint embraces Jon’s comic obliviousness until well after his character begins to blame Saga for the stress at home).
Long on dream imagery and moldy skin makeup but short on scares, jokes, or anything that might add a sense of life to a film steeped in the go-nowhere airlessness of being stuck in your house with a newborn, “Nightborn” turns its genre tropes into a study of maternal ambivalence. Into a silly-serious and blood-spattered portrait of all the things that get scooped out of your life when you have a baby, a wild animal that you’ll eventually release into the world without so much as a “thank you” for the trouble. That this movie half-works in spite of itself is owed to a simple fact that most parents will implicitly understand regardless of their Finnish: For all of its grotesqueries (and its total absence of pronatal platitudes), “Nightborn” can’t help but suggest that Saga would do it all over again.
Grade: B-
“Nightborn” is now streaming on Shudder.
