Nightborn: Finnish myths are lost in the thicket of this gory post-partum horror
Director Hanna Bergholm’s monstrous exploration of new parenthood ends up feeling overstuffed writes George Townsend, one of the critics on this year’s LFF Critics Mentorship Programme.
- Reviewed from the 2026 London Film Festival
Nightborn, the second feature from Finnish director Hanna Bergholm, doesn’t exactly break new ground. It has plenty in common with maternal creep-shows like Rosemary’s Baby (1968), Immaculate (2024) and Bergholm’s own 2022 debut, Hatching (which followed a pre-teen girl who finds a mysterious egg), but it also draws from folk and body horror, taking place as it does in a dark, whispering wood and featuring many scenes of bodily gore (including but not limited to: scratching, biting, swelling, and a particularly violent on-screen birth). Tropes from various horror subgenres are twisted together throughout its runtime – demon babies, supernatural forests, neglectful husbands. The result is a predictable, pleasantly-unpleasant 92 minutes, a film as gnarly (and slightly wonky) as the trees that surround the home of the unfortunate couple at its centre.
Nightborn follows Saga (Seidi Haarla) and Jon (Rupert Grint), a mixed-nationality couple (she a Finn and he an Englishman) who emigrate to rural Finland to conceive and raise their first child (of, they hope, many) in the home of Saga’s grandmother. That picturesque vision of the modern nuclear family vanishes when their precious baby arrives furry and clawed. They name him Kuura, the Finnish word for frost.
Bergholm is not adapting any specific folktale. Instead she plays with the vague concept of Finnish forest trolls (though the film never explicitly names the baby as one). The director reacquaints us with Finland’s ancient rendition of these woodland monsters, one that’s far removed from Tove Jansson’s round, friendly Moomins. Nightborn’s hirsute infant is skilfully created using realistic puppets and raspy, guttural cooing (performed by a chorus of actors, including Bergholm’s own young son and Max Cavalera, the co-lead of death metal band, Sepultura).
But it is Saga’s psychological deterioration, rather than the ‘troll’, that gives the story its main engine (along with the slow post-partum destruction of the female body, which is channelled through the exquisitely gory foley work of Tapio Liukkonen). Though Kuura is not human, he represents the primal effect babies can have on their parents – how they can awaken our most animalistic desires to survive and protect. By spending time with the creature, Saga becomes almost primitive by attrition; in a likely nod to Rosemary’s Baby, she begins to crave raw meat. This marks the start of her degradation, but it’s the assertions from her family that she, not the baby, is the problem, that push her over the edge.
Where the film falls short, though, is in the lack of depth afforded to its supporting characters. Rupert Grint approaches Jon with sincerity and yet he ends up reading as a caricature of the absent and clueless foreign husband. He and the family’s cartoonish obliviousness to Kuura’s monstrousness feels engineered to ramp up the sense of maternal gaslighting. The film’s more mystical, folkloric elements wind up feeling like an afterthought as a result. Ultimately, Nightborn plants its ideas too close together, leaving multiple storylines fighting for sunlight, unable to fully sprout.
► Nightborn is in UK cinemas 30 October.