The trailer for Nightborn was vague in exactly the right way. There was a remote house, a Finnish forest, a troubled mother, Rupert Grint looking increasingly concerned about whatever was happening in the nursery, and a baby the camera seemed determined not to show properly. It had the atmosphere of folk horror without immediately dressing itself in all the usual ceremonial furniture. No antlers, no ominous village festival, no elderly local explaining that outsiders should really have stayed on the main road. Just trees, an old house, family history and the growing suspicion that something in the cot was not behaving according to the instructions.
That was enough for me. Hanna Bergholm had already made Hatching in 2022, and the combination of motherhood, body horror, family dysfunction and something distinctly non-human developing inside an apparently ordinary household immediately made Nightborn interesting. In fact, that earlier film became almost impossible for me to put aside while watching this one. Nightborn is not a sequel and is not directly connected to Hatching, but it returns to enough of the same emotional and visual territory that the comparison becomes part of the viewing experience, particularly if Bergholm’s first feature is still reasonably fresh in the memory.
The basic arrangement is simple enough. Saga, played by Seidi Haarla, and her British husband Jon, played by Rupert Grint, move to the isolated Finnish house where Saga spent part of her childhood. Their intention is to restore the place, settle into the countryside and start the large family Saga has already imagined for herself. It is one of those plans that sounds attractive when spoken aloud before anyone has inspected the floorboards or considered why the surrounding forest seems quite so interested in the property.
Their first child, Kuura, arrives after a difficult pregnancy and birth, and almost immediately Saga believes something is wrong with him. He is unusually hairy, reacts badly to light, refuses ordinary food and has an appetite that moves quickly from worrying to carnivorous. Jon, doctors and various family members prefer explanations that locate the problem somewhere within Saga herself: exhaustion, postpartum distress, difficulty bonding with the child, fear, resentment or simply the messy reality of motherhood colliding with the idealised version she had expected.
Saga, inconveniently for everyone, is largely correct. Kuura is connected to something older in the Finnish woods, and his arrival begins waking up aspects of Saga’s own family history that have either been misunderstood or deliberately suppressed. Nightborn gradually becomes a story not about discovering that a child is evil, but about discovering that the child may be perfectly normal according to a set of rules nobody inside the house wants to acknowledge.
I enjoyed the film, although it rarely surprised me. I also spent a considerable amount of time waiting for the grand revelation of what the baby actually looked like, partly because Bergholm so carefully avoids giving us a clear view. After enough hair, teeth, screams, raw meat and strategically positioned blankets, the mind begins designing something spectacular. What eventually appears is, comparatively speaking, a fairly normal-looking child with troll characteristics rather than the full creature-feature payoff I had imagined. The film has reasons for doing this, and some of them are quite good, but I still felt the faint disappointment of someone who had been told for ninety minutes that there was something extraordinary behind a curtain only to discover that the curtain was doing quite a lot of the work.
The House Was Unstable Before the Baby Arrived
Saga and Jon’s house is one of the film’s strongest elements because it tells us what kind of story we are watching before the characters understand it themselves. They arrive with the enthusiasm of people beginning a new phase of life, but the building is already decaying and the surrounding woodland appears to have been patiently reclaiming it. The domestic dream exists, but it has been built over roots.
That image runs throughout Nightborn. Human order is represented by renovation, decoration, family planning, nurseries, doctors, food schedules and all the practical structures adults create in the hope that life will behave itself. The forest represents something older and considerably less interested in those arrangements. Saga and Jon can repair walls and replace flooring, but the sense that the house belongs provisionally to them never entirely goes away.
The official production credits reinforce how deliberately constructed that physical environment is. Bergholm directed and co-wrote the screenplay with Ilja Rautsi, with Pietari Peltola serving as cinematographer, Kari Kankaanpää handling set design and Micke Nyström credited with sound design. Eicca Toppinen of Apocalyptica composed the original music. The film was produced in 2025 before playing in Competition at the 2026 Berlin International Film Festival.
The house never needs to announce itself as haunted because that is not quite what is happening. It feels less like a container for a supernatural presence than a temporary interruption in the natural landscape. The roots pushing beneath it, the vegetation pressing against it and the sapling appearing where it clearly should not all suggest that Saga and Jon have not moved into an empty property. They have attempted to impose a particular version of family life on a place that remembers something different.
There is something very familiar in that rural fantasy. Leaving the city, restoring an old house, raising children closer to nature and recovering some imagined simplicity has become its own lifestyle mythology, endlessly repackaged through renovation programmes, Instagram feeds and property fantasies. Horror has always been good at asking what exactly we think we are returning to when we go “back” to the countryside. Nightborn gives a particularly Finnish answer: perhaps the old place remembers you rather better than you remember it.
Hatching Is Difficult to Leave Outside
Bergholm’s Hatching followed a young gymnast living under the oppressive gaze of a mother obsessed with projecting a perfect family image. The girl secretly nurtures a mysterious egg until it produces a creature that gradually becomes an external expression of emotions she has been forced to suppress. It was a wonderfully physical idea, made more effective by the practical creature work and by the way domestic perfection slowly became indistinguishable from grotesque transformation. Goodfellas describes Hatching as Bergholm’s feature debut and credits Ilja Rautsi as its screenwriter, with animatronic designer Gustav Hoegen and special-effects make-up supervisor Conor O’Sullivan among the crew.
Coming to Nightborn after that, it is difficult not to feel that Bergholm is continuing an argument with the idea of the perfect family. This time the viewpoint has shifted from the child to the mother. Instead of a girl producing a monster because of the emotional pressure placed upon her, we have a woman discovering that motherhood itself has produced something she cannot recognise and is not permitted to dislike.
Bergholm has spoken about drawing on the difficult and socially awkward emotions surrounding parenthood, particularly the aspects of motherhood that people are often reluctant to discuss openly. Reuters reported that she wanted the film to engage with the physical realities of childbirth and with feelings that sit uneasily beside the expectation that a mother should experience immediate, uncomplicated love. Grint also discussed responding to the material from his own perspective as a parent.
That gives Nightborn its strongest emotional foundation. Saga does not simply fear that her child is dangerous. She fears that she does not feel what everyone keeps telling her she should feel, and because the audience can see that Kuura genuinely is behaving strangely, the film traps us between two interpretations at once. Saga may be exhausted and alienated, but she is not imagining the teeth.
The similarities with Hatching remain considerable, though. Both films put female experience into a grotesque physical form, both use the home as an unstable visual expression of family expectations, and both allow something animal or folkloric to expose emotions that respectable domestic life would rather keep hidden. That continuity is clearly intentional, but it also means Nightborn has less novelty. I had already seen Bergholm use a creature to break apart the lie of the perfect family, and this time I found myself recognising the mechanism before the film had fully wound it up.
That did not make the film dull, but it made it predictable. Hatching had the advantage of surprise because its creature kept changing both physically and symbolically. Nightborn establishes the broad direction quite early. The woods are wrong, the family history is incomplete, Kuura is plainly not an ordinary infant, and Saga’s own childhood contains enough warning signs that the eventual revelation of inherited supernatural identity feels less like a twist than confirmation.
Saga and the Mother She Thought She Would Be
Seidi Haarla gives the film the performance that allows all of this to work. Saga begins with a clear picture of herself and of the life she expects to have, but motherhood dismantles that picture almost immediately. What makes Haarla effective is that she never turns Saga into a conventional hysterical horror-film mother. Her fear is mixed with irritation, physical pain, shame, practical problem-solving and eventually a form of protectiveness that does not resemble the maternal instinct she had presumably imagined beforehand.
The film is particularly uncomfortable when it stays close to the physical cost of having Kuura. His feeding injures Saga, his appetites become increasingly disturbing, and the ordinary rhythms of caring for an infant turn into body horror. The details are exaggerated into the supernatural, but the underlying situation is recognisable: another body requires constant access to hers, everyone is concerned primarily with whether the baby is thriving, and Saga’s own physical damage becomes something she is expected to absorb as part of the arrangement.
Her refusal to respond to Kuura in the appropriately sentimental way becomes evidence against her. She struggles to bond with him and at times speaks about him as though he were an object or an intruder, which is exactly the kind of maternal behaviour that makes everyone around her uncomfortable. Yet because the film gives us enough evidence that Kuura genuinely is something other than human, Saga’s alienation cannot simply be diagnosed away.
That tension is more interesting than the folklore mystery. The real question is not whether Saga is right about Kuura. She clearly is. It is whether discovering what he is will allow her to love him, or whether love itself has to be redefined once she accepts that the child she has been given bears very little resemblance to the child she expected.
Her gradual decision to feed him what he will actually eat is where the film becomes particularly effective. Blood and raw meat are grotesque substitutes for conventional baby food, but the act itself is almost mundane. Saga has observed her son, understood his needs and adjusted. She is parenting, just not in a manner anyone from the health clinic is likely to endorse.
There is also a useful distinction between Saga accepting Kuura and Saga becoming comfortable with him. Nightborn does not suddenly transform their relationship into something warm and uncomplicated. The connection grows out of recognition rather than sentimentality. Saga begins to understand that the problem may not be that Kuura is defective; the problem may be that the entire human environment surrounding him is inappropriate.
Rupert Grint and the Servant Problem
Rupert Grint is good in Nightborn, although I found it almost impossible not to think about Servant. That Apple TV+ series spent four seasons trapping him inside a beautifully appointed domestic nightmare involving grief, religion, parenthood and a deeply unsettling baby, so seeing him once again wandering around a large house while something inexplicable happens in the nursery creates an unavoidable afterimage.
It is not really Grint’s fault. Jon and Julian from Servant are different characters, and Grint plays Jon with a softer quality than the abrasive, frequently drunken energy he brought to M. Night Shyamalan and Tony Basgallop’s series. Still, there are moments when he gives the cot a particular look or stands in a doorway absorbing the latest piece of supernatural childcare information and I half expected someone from Philadelphia to ring him.
Jon begins as an essentially decent husband. He supports Saga’s plan, moves with her to Finland and initially tries to manage the difficult early months of parenthood with patience. His refusal to believe that Kuura is a supernatural creature is also perfectly understandable for a long time. If your exhausted wife announces that your newborn child is some form of troll, arranging a medical appointment before consulting a folklorist seems a reasonable first step.
The difficulty is that Jon’s scepticism eventually survives far beyond the point where scepticism is credible. Kuura’s behaviour becomes too obviously abnormal, and Jon increasingly transfers his anxiety onto Saga rather than reconsidering his assumptions. Once he sees the child eating raw meat and has direct evidence that something is very wrong, his insistence that Saga has somehow created the problem begins to make him feel less like a frightened father and more like the dramatic obstacle the screenplay needs for its final act.
This is where the marriage could have used more space. Haarla is allowed to change considerably across the film, while Grint is increasingly required to represent normality, rationality and the human world Saga is moving away from. Jon’s decision to take Kuura and seek primary custody is emotionally understandable in outline, but because his understanding of events remains so limited, the confrontation arrives with an element of inevitability rather than tragedy.
I could see what the film wanted from him. Jon loves his child according to one definition of love: he wants to protect Kuura from what he believes Saga is doing to him. Saga eventually loves Kuura according to another: she stops trying to turn him into something he is not. That conflict is interesting, but Jon becomes too firmly fixed on one side of it.
Grint nevertheless brings enough warmth to the earlier scenes that his fate still has some weight. He never plays Jon as a straightforward villain, and that matters because the ending would be considerably less interesting if he did. He is a man trying to keep his family inside the boundaries of reality long after reality has quietly packed up and moved into the woods.
The Child Behind the Blanket
The concealment of Kuura is one of Nightborn’s most effective ideas and, for me, one of its frustrations. Bergholm repeatedly gives us fragments rather than a complete view: too much hair, strange movement, teeth, damaged skin, an appetite that does not belong in an ordinary nursery. The camera knows that our imagination is useful and keeps feeding it just enough material to remain active.
That approach creates a strong alignment with Saga. She knows that there is something fundamentally wrong, but everyone around her keeps insisting that what she sees can be explained. The audience is encouraged to scrutinise the same details, looking for confirmation in glimpses that disappear before they can be properly understood.
The trouble is that concealment creates expectation. The longer a horror film refuses to show a creature, the more elaborate that creature becomes inside the viewer’s head. By the time Nightborn finally gives us a proper look at Kuura, I had built a considerably more grotesque troll baby than the film actually provides.
What we eventually see is still unusual, but much more recognisably human than I expected. His difference is expressed through instinct, appetite and his supernatural relationship with the forest rather than through some grand monstrous face. Once I understood what Bergholm was doing, I could see the logic. If Kuura had turned out to be a spectacular prosthetic goblin, Saga’s eventual acceptance of him would become easier to read as a simple story about embracing a monster. Keeping him close to human forces the film to make the boundary less visually comfortable.
It also connects with the film’s use of folklore. Nightborn is an original screenplay rather than an adaptation of a particular novel or traditional tale. Bergholm and Rautsi use material associated with Finnish and Scandinavian forest beings, changeling traditions and trolls, but the story is not presented as a direct retelling of one specific myth. The official credits list Bergholm and Rautsi as the screenwriters, rather than identifying any literary source.
Some interpretations of the ending describe Saga herself as a form of changeling or forest-being descendant, with Kuura therefore functioning less as a substituted human baby than as a child whose inherited nature has emerged without being hidden. The film supports that broader reading through Saga’s childhood behaviour, her grandmother’s attempts to keep the forest at a distance and Kuura’s obvious response to the woods, although trying to classify everyone too precisely according to one piece of folklore rather misses the film’s more fluid mythology.
So I understand why Kuura looks the way he does. I also still wanted a better monster reveal. Both responses can exist quite comfortably together.
Family Advice, Medical Advice and Other Forms of Not Listening
One of the recurring patterns in Nightborn is that Saga tells people what she is experiencing and everyone translates it into something they already understand. Medical professionals see a distressed new mother. Jon sees a wife becoming obsessive. Family members remember that Saga herself was a difficult child but initially treat this as reassurance rather than evidence.
The supporting cast includes Pamela Tola as Taru, Pirkko Saisio as Saga’s mother, Rebecca Lacey as Jon’s mother and John Thomson as Jon’s father. They provide several different versions of family intervention, none of which are especially useful because everyone arrives carrying an explanation rather than listening closely enough to what Saga is saying.
This could easily have become a heavy-handed metaphor for medical gaslighting, and the film occasionally gets close, but the supernatural element complicates it in useful ways. Saga is not simply a woman whose legitimate physical experience is being dismissed; she is also making claims that would sound completely irrational in any ordinary circumstance. The people around her are wrong, but they are wrong for understandable reasons.
Her mother’s memories of Saga as an unusually difficult child gradually become more significant because they suggest the pattern existed long before Kuura. What had been absorbed into family history as temperament may actually have been evidence of the same inheritance. The film is interested in the way families normalise strange things over generations, particularly when nobody wants to name them directly.
That is where the old house matters again. Saga is not simply returning to a location. She is re-entering a system of memory that predates her understanding of herself. Her grandmother’s warnings about the forest, the physical barriers around the property and Saga’s own childhood attraction to the woods begin to look less like eccentric rural superstition and more like an attempt to interrupt something hereditary.
I would have liked more of this. The generational material is one of the richest things in the film, but Nightborn tends to use it as explanatory machinery rather than allowing it to expand. There is an entire second story buried beneath Saga’s childhood and her grandmother’s efforts to control what was happening, and I occasionally found myself more interested in that history than in another scene of Jon insisting that everything would probably be fine.
Music, Design and a Forest That Never Feels Decorative
Visually, Nightborn is at its strongest when domestic space and natural space begin bleeding into one another. The house is initially transformed into something warmer and more controlled, particularly the nursery, but the landscape keeps intruding. Roots, timber, moss, damaged floors and dark windows make the distinction between indoors and outdoors increasingly provisional.
Pietari Peltola’s cinematography rarely treats the Finnish forest as postcard scenery. It is dense, obstructed and physically close to the characters. Even when it is beautiful, it does not feel empty. There is always the possibility that the landscape is looking back.
As someone who tends to notice production design, I liked the fact that the film avoids overloading its folklore with decorative symbolism. There are no elaborate troll kingdoms or piles of conveniently illustrated ancient manuscripts. The supernatural appears through materials: hair, wood, flesh, iron, roots and blood. That restraint suits the film far better than a more overt fantasy vocabulary would have done.
Eicca Toppinen’s music contributes to the same feeling. The Goodfellas credits identify the Apocalyptica co-founder as the film’s composer, and the score works less as a set of themes to remember afterwards than as a low pressure moving through the house and forest. The sound design is equally important because Kuura is often most disturbing when he is somewhere just outside the frame, making noises that an ordinary child should not be making.
There is also something quietly nostalgic in Saga’s return to the family property, although the film treats nostalgia with appropriate suspicion. Going back to a childhood home usually carries the promise of continuity: the possibility that a place can reconnect us with some version of ourselves that existed before adulthood complicated everything. Nightborn turns that idea inside out. Saga does reconnect with her childhood, but what returns is precisely the thing the adults around her had tried to contain.
The past has not been preserved for her. It has been waiting.
Predictability Is Not Quite the Same as Boredom
I thought the pacing was fine. Nightborn is not especially fast, but folk horror rarely benefits from charging towards the bonfire, and the film needs enough domestic repetition for Saga’s isolation to become oppressive. Feeding, crying, arguing, medical appointments and family visits create the sense of time becoming circular, which is appropriate for a story about early parenthood.
The problem is that the underlying mystery does not develop at the same rate. Long before the film formally explains the supernatural inheritance, Kuura’s behaviour has already made the answer obvious. He cannot tolerate ordinary food, he responds strangely to light and iron, he has a physical connection with the forest and his mother has forgotten or suppressed important details from her own childhood. Once the word “troll” enters the conversation, Poirot is unlikely to be required.
That means the film’s middle stretch depends more on the emotional conflict between Saga and Jon than on suspense about Kuura. For me, that was enough to keep it watchable, but it also meant several scenes felt as though they were waiting for Jon to catch up with information the audience had already accepted.
This is another area where Hatching was stronger. Its creature kept changing the terms of the story. Nightborn reveals its basic direction relatively early and then asks us to observe Saga moving towards acceptance. That is a perfectly valid structure, but it makes the film feel more inevitable than unsettling.
What kept me interested was the question of where Saga herself would end up. Would she destroy Kuura, attempt to cure him, leave him with the forest or recognise his otherness as part of her own? Once the film stops pretending the answer concerns the baby alone, it becomes much stronger.
When the Woods Finally Come Inside
The final confrontation arrives when Jon decides that Saga has become the danger and attempts to take Kuura away. By then he has witnessed enough to know that the child is not ordinary, but he still interprets the situation primarily through Saga’s influence. His intention to seek custody effectively turns the argument about what Kuura is into a physical attempt to separate mother and child.
That is the point at which the forest stops being atmospheric.
Roots and branches tear through the house and Jon is violently impaled. The building that Saga and Jon spent the film trying to restore is finally reclaimed by the landscape beneath it, collapsing the division between family home and woodland that had never been particularly secure in the first place. Accounts of the ending also note that Jon’s removal of old iron and scrap from around the property can be read as dismantling a barrier Saga’s grandmother had deliberately maintained against the forest.
Saga’s response is considerably more important than Jon’s death. She does not recoil from Kuura or attempt to reassert the human world after the violence. Instead, she joins him in consuming Jon’s flesh and heart, finally expressing physically what the film has been moving towards psychologically: she recognises that whatever exists inside Kuura also exists inside her.
It is an extreme image, but the extremity is useful because anything gentler would have softened the transformation. Saga does not achieve maternal fulfilment by suddenly holding Kuura correctly or whispering that she loves him. She accepts him by abandoning the assumptions that made him monstrous in the first place, and in doing so she also abandons the human identity that had kept her own nature under control.
The final movement into the forest is quieter. Kuura approaches the figures waiting among the trees, seemingly recognising a community or ancestry to which he belongs. Saga watches him without the panic that defined much of the film, and the child who had seemed impossible inside the nursery suddenly looks entirely appropriate once he is outside it.
This is also where the restrained visual design of Kuura makes the most sense. He does not need to transform into the monster I had spent the film expecting because the point is not that a hidden monster has finally been exposed. The point is that the category itself has shifted. Inside the house he was wrong; inside the forest he simply belongs.
Motherhood Without the Advertising Image
The horror of Nightborn sits comfortably within a longer tradition of films about pregnancy, difficult birth and maternal ambivalence, and Bergholm herself has compared the premise jokingly to beginning where Rosemary’s Baby leaves off: after the unusual child is born and somebody actually has to raise it. Reuters described the film as an exploration of parental hardship and taboos around motherhood, particularly the emotional and physical experiences that are often excluded from more idealised representations of becoming a parent.
That is where the film feels most culturally relevant. We live in a period when motherhood is simultaneously discussed more openly than ever and packaged with extraordinary visual discipline. Social media gives us endless documentation of pregnancy announcements, nurseries, birth stories and the domestic aesthetics of new parenthood. Even supposed authenticity can become another style of presentation.
Saga begins with her own version of that image. She wants the house, the children and the meaningful return to the countryside. What she gets is blood, exhaustion, bodily damage, a child she initially cannot love and a husband increasingly unable to understand what is happening to her.
The troll mythology exaggerates that gap between expectation and reality until it becomes horror. Kuura is the child who will not behave according to the image prepared for him, and Saga’s first instinct is to treat that difference as something fundamentally wrong. Everyone else insists that the child is normal while quietly judging her for failing to respond normally herself.
By the ending, both assumptions have collapsed. Kuura is not normal according to human standards, but the film no longer regards that fact as a problem requiring correction. Saga is not the mother she expected to become either, but she has found a form of maternal recognition that exists outside the approved version.
There are potentially uncomfortable implications in framing childhood difference through monstrosity, particularly when the story touches on ideas of a child who does not eat, behave or develop as expected. What saves Nightborn from becoming too simplistic is that it ultimately turns the judgement back onto the environment. Kuura does not become acceptable because he changes. Saga changes her understanding of where he belongs.
That does not make him harmless, obviously. The family has reached the stage where eating Dad’s heart has entered the bonding process, and no amount of metaphor should make us overlook that. The film simply refuses to equate danger with moral evil in the conventional horror sense.
Enjoyable, Familiar and Slightly Less Strange Than I Wanted
My response to Nightborn remains mixed but positive. I liked its atmosphere, its physicality and Haarla’s performance, and I think Bergholm continues to have a very good eye for the point where domestic anxiety becomes creature horror. The house, forest and practical effects give the film a tactile quality that helps it avoid becoming another polished streaming horror film in which everything unpleasant has been colour-graded into the same blue-grey darkness.
I also liked Rupert Grint, even though his presence inevitably brought Servant into the room with him. There is something amusing about watching an actor move from one prolonged supernatural-baby crisis directly into another, particularly when both involve large houses, anxious adults and the gradual collapse of rational explanation. It is probably unfair to him, but once the association entered my head it stayed there.
The weaknesses are mostly structural. The film is predictable, Jon becomes too rigidly positioned as the disbelieving husband, the family folklore deserves more development, and Hatching casts such a long shadow that some of Nightborn’s ideas feel like variations rather than discoveries. Most of all, the concealment of Kuura creates a creature expectation that the eventual reveal deliberately refuses to satisfy.
I can defend that choice thematically while still wishing the baby had been stranger. Horror viewing is capable of containing sophisticated interpretations alongside the basic desire to see what horrible thing has been hiding in the cot.
Perhaps that contradiction sums up my response to the film. Nightborn did not give me the troll baby I thought I was waiting for, but its more interesting idea is that Saga eventually stops waiting for one too. She begins by looking at Kuura and seeing a mistake, something malformed that must surely reveal its true monstrous nature if she looks long enough. By the end, she understands that she has been asking the wrong question.
Kuura walks towards the trees looking far more comfortable there than he ever did inside the carefully prepared nursery, while Saga remains amid the wreckage of the family life she had planned. The film does not need to pretend that this is a happy ending, nor does it treat it entirely as a tragic one. The house was never going to contain what had been growing underneath it, and once the walls finally give way, the forest does what it had apparently intended to do all along.
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