‘People don’t want to deal with things that are happening right in front of them’: the horror of Hatching

Finnish director Hanna Bergholm and screenwriter Ilja Rautsi discuss their bloody coming-of-age film about an angst-ridden pre-teen who nurtures an unhatched egg – with devastating consequences

‘People don’t want to deal with things that are happening right in front of them’: the horror of Hatching

‘I traced it back to a nightmare I had as a child,” says the Finnish screenwriter Ilja Rautsi. “There was an evil doppelganger of me that went around doing bad stuff and came to gloat at my window.” Rautsi is talking about the inspiration behind his first feature screenplay, Hatching, about a lonely 12-year-old girl who cares for a strange egg – out of which hatches a doppelganger.

Rautsi says he wrote the idea down in his notebook, where it remained until he met the director Hanna Bergholm at a networking event organised by the Finnish Film Foundation. Despite the fact that they had only five minutes to speak, Rautsi felt an instant creative connection: “I had an idea that she wanted to build these worlds that are fantastical, but also deal with real emotion.” So he offered her his one-line pitch.

Bergholm, a graduate of the University of Art and Design Helsinki, was immediately hooked. “That one sentence was very cool; it was an idea I hadn’t seen before,” she says. She did make one request: that the protagonist, originally a boy, become a girl – motivated, she says, by her desire to see more female characters on screen.

Rautsi says that the simple tweak was the key to unlocking the dramatic potential of his idea. “It fit into all this stuff about what’s expected of girls, how they are under so much pressure from society about how to behave. It felt like the right character to build the story through.”

“It really became a story of metamorphosis,” adds Bergholm, who knew she wanted the protagonist to be on the brink of adolescence. “In the Finnish language, ‘hatching’ also means ‘brooding’. For me, it felt like this girl is brooding some emotions, trying to hide some sides of her character under the perfect surface of this egg.”

This girl is Tinja (played by Siiri Solalinna): a quiet, dedicated gymnast who wants nothing more than to please her demanding mother (Sophia Heikkilä), a self-absorbed vlogger who is desperate to win the approval of an online audience with her carefully curated version of perfect family life. Behind the coordinated pastel colours and ice-white smiles lies the dark truth that Tinja will never be good enough to win her mother’s approval; she is consumed by constant maternal rejection. So, when she finds an abandoned egg, she is driven to take care of it. Under her watchful eye, it grows, until, eventually, it hatches, in a flurry of gore and feathers.

Family values … Hatching warns of the dangers of trying to create a perfect version of domestic life. Photograph: Andrejs Strokins

Bergholm auditioned about 1,200 girls across Finland for the challenging role of Tinja. “Finally, we found Siiri, who had just turned 12 and had never acted anywhere before, not even in school plays. She was such a natural talent.”

Tinja’s weighty secret makes her behaviour become more erratic, but, thanks to the distracted adults around her, it is constantly explained away. Blood in her bed? She must have started her period. Sounds of vomiting behind her bedroom door? An eating disorder. While other films might indulge in the ambiguity of whether the creature exists only in Tinja’s head, Hatching’s audience is never left in any doubt that it is real.

“At times, it could be read that it is just a metaphor,” says Rautsi. “And we had some attempts at playing around with that. But Hatching is about the very fact that people don’t want to deal with things that are happening right in front of them.”

What interests me is female experiences and telling the truth from deep down

Bergholm not only shared that view, but also decided, very early on, that the hatchling should in some scenes be the work of puppetry, not CGI. “I wanted this creature to have a real physicality, so that you can really believe it’s there,” she says. Working with concept artists, to whom she provided reference images of “beaks and anorexic bodies”, Bergholm concocted a design that was eventually brought to life by the Dutch animatronics designer Gustav Hoegen (Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Prometheus) – that was “deformed in every way – the total opposite of the perfect humanness that Tinja’s mother expects. But not an evil character, so it has those very innocent eyes.”

Rautsi says: “We talked about that a lot – whether anyone was going to feel sympathy for the creature because it’s so hideous. But I always knew that the moment it made a pitiful whimpering sound, anyone in the audience who has ever had a pet would immediately feel sympathy.”

‘Whatever you put in front of the camera becomes real’ … Hatching screenwriter Ilya Rautsi on his love of the horror genre. — ‘Whatever you put in front of the camera becomes real’ … Hatching. Photograph: Andrejs Strokins

Working with a puppet allowed him to indulge his love of 80s movies such as Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal. “There’s something very charming about them. You’re watching them and you know that it’s completely fake, but at the same time it’s physically real. One of the major draws in horror films, for me, is that whatever you put in front of the camera becomes real.”

Clearly, Bergholm feels drawn to exploring the female experience and particularly to probing the dark, challenging, messy spaces that other film-makers prefer to ignore. Having achieved alchemy with Hatching, Rautsi and Bergholm are collaborating on another genre project, which has the working title Night Born. “It’s about a woman who has her first child and starts to feel that there’s something weird about the baby,” says Bergholm. “Her body changes after childbirth in a way that she didn’t expect and it’s horrifying for her. It’s about difficult emotions surrounding motherhood, wrapped up in a kind of fantasy.

“What interests me is female experiences and telling the truth from deep down. I’m fascinated by difficult emotions – those that don’t really fit into the role that is given to women in society, or in cinema.”