Watch Hannah Bergholm’s award-winning body horror feature Hatching (2022), preceded by the director’s short film Puppet Master (2018).  

HATCHING / PAHANHAUTOJA 

Twelve-year-old gymnast Tinja (Siiri Solalinna) is desperate to please her image-obsessed mother, whose popular blog Lovely Everyday Life presents their family’s idyllic existence as manicured suburban perfection. One day, after finding a wounded bird in the woods, Tinja brings its strange egg home, nestles it in her bed and nurtures it until it hatches. The creature that emerges becomes her closest friend and a living nightmare, plunging Tinja beneath the impeccable veneer into a twisted reality that her mother refuses to see.  

Hatching is a fascinating portrait of the nature of maternal instinct, as Tinja battles to come to terms with the genuine emotional bond with her grotesque and bloodthirsty new-found family member while contending with the fraying connection to her own demanding mother. (Description courtesy of IFC Films.)  

Hanna Bergholm, 2022, Finland/Sweden, 91 min. In Finnish with English subtitles.  

Preceded by:

PUPPET MASTER / NUKKEMESTARI  

A lonely woman, yearning to be caressed, allows a man to transform her into a puppet. But when the man loses interest, the puppet won’t let go. Filmmaker Hanna Bergholm infuses this short fantasy drama with horror elements, combining actors and puppets in a poetic story about longing for love, living in an objectifying relationship and clinging to another person.  

Hanna Bergholm, 2018, Finland, 15 min. In Finnish with English subtitles.