★★
Nightborn trades folk-horror menace for contrivance and a flat Rupert Grint, drawing its tension from people talking past each other until you just want them all to shut up.
Hanna Bergholm’s Hatching announced a real talent for turning maternal anxiety into wet, wriggling body horror. Nightborn, her English-language debut, reaches for the same nerve and mostly pinches it. Call it Troll My Love: Lynne Ramsay’s high-strung postpartum relationship implosion Die My Love relocated to a Finnish forest and handed a folkloric changeling, all the postpartum dread intact but none of the control.
Saga (Seidi Haarla) and her British husband Jon (Rupert Grint) retreat to her childhood home to build a family. Their son arrives, and Saga alone senses that something is wrong. The film traps her in a maddening loop: nobody believes her, she insists, people find her insistence to worrying, etc. The tension is meant to come from everyone talking past one another. For the audience it is nails on a chalkboard. I just wanted everyone in this film to shut up.
The logic wobbles too. We are asked to accept that no one will credit a mother who claims her newborn can walk about, yet when it actually gets up and moves, she never thinks to reach for a phone. A single video would settle the argument, but she just gawps and frets. Bergholm wants ambiguity; she settles for contrivance.
Grint, meanwhile, is the weakest link, a flat, disengaged presence who convinces as neither loving husband nor fraying sceptic. The emotional dynamic he anchors, meant to ache, merely grates.
There is a decent folk horror buried in here, and the closing stretch finally locates some of Bergholm’s old visceral charge. But Nightborn mostly mistakes people shouting past each other for dramatic pressure. Die My Love earned its despair. This one just tests your patience.
Nightborn played at the Fantasia Film Festival