Motherhood is scary stuff.
From “Rosemary’s Baby” through to “The Babadook” and “Hereditary,” a certain breed of horror film has taught us as much.
Equally disturbing, in Hanna Bergholm’s inventive, alarmingly sunny genre outing “Hatching,” is adolescence: lurking under a protective mother’s wings, waiting to crack and come of age in a Finnish suburb’s suffocating, expertly calibrated atmosphere.But “Hatching” is no blood-soaked “Carrie.” One could instead think of it as the weird lovechild of “American Beauty” and a grotesque version of “E.T.,” with the uncanny touch of Yorgos Lanthimos.
Even this comparison feels incomplete in defining Bergholm’s directorial debut, a wicked foray into youthful anxieties that is admitted short on genuine scares, but full of delicious squirms and cringes through Bergholm’s skillful play with body horror and doppelgänger tropes — the same spirit that gave us both Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Dr.
Jekyll and Mr.
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