Motherhood can be an extremely difficult time, especially for first time mothers. And not simply because of the massive lifestyle change. Postpartum depression affects a not insignificant number of women, and the symptoms are absolutely nightmarish. Hannah Bergholm’s fantasy horror film Nightborn takes a simple but eerie concept (one’s own baby as an other) and uses it as springboard into a ghastly story about the challenges of new parenthood and the effects that can have on the lives of the parents.
Saga and Jon are on the brink of something wonderful. Having purchased Saga’s grandmother’s house deep in the Finnish forest with plans to fix it up and start a family, everything seems to be going great until that family actually gets started. Their newborn baby boy is covered in hair, screams when being touched, has an odd aversion to light, and ominously seems to enjoy the taste of blood over milk. Worst of all is the fact that something in the woods seems to respond to the child’s constantly animalistic crying. Soon, the two new parents must have a reckoning with the possibility that their child isn’t their child.
This film is an exercise in depicting how tense and wrought with anxiety new motherhood is. Even if you remove all the overtly supernatural elements of the film, it’s an incredibly effective and explicit depiction in how stressful that stage in someone’s life can be. Whether it’s a well-meaning but belittling husband who won’t stay in his lane, a stern and distant mother who is convinced she knows better than anyone how to raise a child, or what can essentially be boiled down to an extremely fussy baby. Before things even get ooky spooky Bergholm lays out a vision of being a parent that made me glad I never had children. Once you add the fact that this child apparently thrives on blood and is burned by cold iron (Hellboy fans will be quick to catch that little detail) Nightborn becomes a glimpse into hell, set to the baby-from-Eraserhead-esque emotionally erosive mewling of this weird like thing Saga and Jon now cohabitate with.
Seidi Harla as Saga shoulders most of the weight in this film and excels at it. She brings to life a woman who desperately wants to be a good mother and a good wife, and clearly means well, but is strained to the breaking point by the nature of her newborn child. Simultaneously repulsed by and infatuated with her son, Harla’s depiction of Saga is a walking bundle of nerves, a shot to hell, frayed mess of a human made almost less human by a child they don’t merely fail to bond with, as is common with people suffering from postpartum depression, but also see as human. To Saga, her son is something not like her, something outside of humanity. As the film progresses, Harla gracefully gives Saga what is either a loving acceptance of her son to the detriment of everything else or an exhausted sense of surrender to the fact that everything is fucked. I honestly couldn’t quite figure out which one it was.
Rupert Grint as Jon is equally effective. Jon is overbearing and earnest, a know it all who seems to think that his experience is a father is the same as Saga’s as a mother. His inability to accept and understand the essential differences in the parenthood experience for a mother and a father is fuel for the flames of Saga’s increasing exasperation, and it is his inability to accept that the child is indeed something other than what they expected that leads to further mayhem. Jon is good intentioned and doubtlessly loves his wife and child, yes, but his inability to come to terms what is actually happening is emblematic of a kind of man who cannot admit to his own limits of understanding a situation, which ultimately worsens that situation.
Blackly funny at times and incredibly stressful all the time, Nightborn is an engaging look at the challenges of new motherhood and how that time in one’s life can be an emotional landmine waiting to tear everything apart. Subtle and eerie, the film relies more on a sense of the uncanny than the outright grotesque to inspire horror in the viewer, but it is no less scary than something out and out frightening. Atmospheric and strangely fairy tale-esque, the film succeeds in crafting a vision of hopeful parenthood gone off the rails, and the curdling of that vision of the future can be truly horrific.
