Hatching - Quick Movie Review

Critics Score - 7 of 10

General Audience Score - 7 of 10

A new thriller/horror film from the countries of Finland and Sweden called Hatching just debuted at Sundance and gets a wider release in April. This film has quite a few practical effects, a nice creepy atmosphere and lots of blood and gore. While the film doesn’t stick the landing, the first act and the setup are quite enthralling and this Hatching winds up being a perfectly decent little creature feature.

Our tale of the largest order of eggs Benedict ever starts with a family of four, a mom and dad, their daughter Tinja and her brother Matias. The mother is recording videos of her perfect family for her blog but things start to go awry when a black crow flies into the living room and starts breaking vases and knocking glass fixtures down. They subdue the crow but then the mother breaks it’s neck and Tinja takes it outside to the trash. But during the night, she wakes up and goes out to find the crow has disappeared, so she takes a walk through the woods and finds the bird half alive. After smashing it into mush with a rock, she sees an egg the dead bird left behind and takes it home to care for it. After keeping the egg warm a couple days she notices the egg keeps getting bigger until it finally occupies most of her bed. But once the eggs starts to hatch and what’s in it reveals itself, we’re on this ride and there’s no getting off until this baby bird grows up and leaves the nest.

The visual ascetics of the film are excellent, the costumes, houses, wallpaper and production design are also all fantastic. The acting is very good across the board with the daughter doing a particularly decent job because if I had a daughter her age, I wouldn’t let her anywhere near this film. Hatching never gets too scary, but the tight script and less than a hour and a half runtime keep things moving through to the finale. This film never makes it to the level of other Sundance horrors like Hereditary or other Northern European creep fests like Lamb or Midsommar. But it’s originality, visuals and storytelling keep the yolks from breaking and this omelette turns out quite nicely. Might need a little salt though.