“Nightborn”: a film at the crossroads between horror and fantasy about postpartum pain

In 2022, Finnish director Hanna Bergholm received the Grand Jury Prize at the Gérardmer Festival for her first film, Ego. Intimate oddity about the relationship of a young girl in the torment of adolescent femininity and a strange creature hatched from an egg.

Presented at the Berlinale in 2025, his second feature film, Nightborn – in theaters Wednesday July 22 – is, as Egoa new twisted monster film where the director this time explores the twists and turns of postpartum, against a backdrop of forest and Finnish myths. There we find a Seidi Haarla (Compartment No. 62021) who exuberates with emotions and a Rupert Grint who, once removed from the Harry Potter saga (Ron Weasley), revealed himself in the genre and horror (Knock at the Cabin2023; Servant2019-2023; Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities2022).

Saga (Seidi Haarla) and her husband Jon (Rupert Grint) leave London for Finland to renovate the house where she grew up. The old black wooden building stands in the heart of a thick forest which rustles, as if it were breathing and spying on the young couple. Impatient, Saga and Jon are expecting their first child.

But when this one comes into the world, it is hideous, its back strewn with black hairs, and growls more than it cries. Only Saga seems to be disturbed by this strange newborn, who very quickly consumes her and consumes her: it is impossible to breastfeed her without it biting her breasts until they bleed. It seems more and more clear that the child is not normal: is he a troll sent by the spirits of the forest? An evil creature? Jon tries to temper Saga, who begins to have as much anger as love and fear as fascination for this baby.

Folklore and motherhood

Hanna Bergholm offers here a modern horror tale, at the crossroads between the myths of folklore and her experience of motherhood, which we guess is visceral. Nightborn takes up all the codes of folk horror, sometimes drawing inspiration from The Witch (2015) by Robert Eggers, where his forest comes to life. Maternity is a theme already well explored by the genre as in Mister Babadook by Australian Jennifer Kent, where a mother fails to love her child, consumed by anger and regret. Childhood, motherhood, couples, so many themes explored through the prism of horror, a reflection of our contemporary anxieties.

Hanna Bergholm manages to incorporate the fantastic into her story quite effectively, sometimes playing on kitsch, sometimes on black humor, sometimes on the almost grotesque blindness of her secondary characters to the condition of this “baby”. All in a perfectly controlled atmosphere, in this dark house that the woods seem to want to swallow up. A total break between the place where this young couple lives and the outside world, clean, surgical and inorganic.

Here, the frightening thing is as much in this newborn – whose education would be more a matter of ethology, the study of animal behavior – as in the isolation of this young mother whom no one wants to believe, and whom everyone accuses of not creating a bond with her child. It is on this second point that the film undoubtedly becomes too “overexplanatory”, losing the mischief that it drew from the fantastic to draw up its metaphor of the postpartum.

What remains is a very interesting exploration of the dysfunctions of heterosexual couples and the social pressure that weighs on young mothers, carried by an excellent and perfectly credible duo of main actors.

The sheet

Gender : Horror-horror, Fantasy, Forbidden for children under 12
Realization : Hanna Bergholm
With : Seidi Haarla, Rupert Grint, Pamela Tola
Country : Finland, Lithuania, France, Great Britain
Duration : 1h32
Exit : July 22, 2026
Distributer : Wild Bunch Cast
Synopsis: Dreaming of building a peaceful family life, Saga and her husband Jon move into the house where she spent a large part of her childhood, in the heart of the Finnish forest. But from the birth of their child, and despite an entourage that aims to be reassuring, Saga perceives something inexplicable and worrying in her baby…