Starring Siiri Solalinna and Sophia Heikkillä

Directed by Hanna Bergholm

Nordisk Film, in cinemas now

12-year-old Tinja rescues an egg from a dying bird which hatches into a manifestation of dark and unspeakable forces.

For anyone who remembers the BBC comedy show Harry Enfield and Chums, surely its most famous sketch marked the transition of the annoying but likeable ‘Little Brother’ into the sulking monster that was ‘Kevin the Teenager’. At the stroke of midnight on his thirteenth birthday he morphs from an excitable, bright-eyed kid to a spotty, greasy-haired and resentful Neanderthal whose catchphrase is to tell his parents ‘I hate you!’ at every opportunity. How we laughed!

Hatching is essentially the female puberty version of Kevin the Teenager’s metamorphosis with added Finnish body-horror and menstruation. This isn’t a spoiler. Anyone with a modicum of horror expertise can predict pretty much every beat of this wonderful film from about three minutes into the action. For 12-year-old gymnast Tinja (played with chilling innocence by Siiri Solalinna) her transition starts not at the stroke of midnight, but when, emerging from childhood, she first understands the casual cruelty of her oppressively liberal and hypocritical mother (Sophia Heikkillä) in a deed which has the whole audience thinking, ‘this isn’t going to end well’.

The egg which Tinja broods to its titular hatching – in an attempt to remedy the sins of her mother – soon becomes a metaphor, not just for the physical changes of female puberty, but for the painful emotional detachment required for a child truly to mature to the independence of adulthood. Again, this isn’t a spoiler. There’s nothing subtle about Hatching’s metaphorical mission. Indeed, not only has subtlety left the building, it has beaten Elvis to the exit and nicked his cab.

This isn’t a criticism. Writer Ilja Rautsi and director Hanna Bergholm frame the story with fairy tale motifs fusing the dark feminine mystique of Angela Carter with the picture book sensibility of Maurice Sendak, as if rendering Where The Wild Things Are as the nightmare of childhood anger it so nearly is.

As Tinja secretly nurtures her strange new offspring in the closet, there are also clear echoes of Spielberg’s E.T., only with added body dysmorphia and bulimia (and I assure you, I’m not being at all flippant in that last reference).

There are technical nods to E.T. in the representation of Tinja’s adolescent monster. Computer graphics have largely been eschewed in favour of puppetry and animatronics. The solid, physicality of the thing reminded me how heartily sick I am of the sterility of CGI. Yes, there are moments when you can sense the working parts, but at least it’s there, and the story-telling is so good you want to believe and that only adds to the power of the film.

So… to sum up: A complete lack of subtlety. Tick. Predictable down to the last frame. Tick. Retro FX that hark back to the 1970s. Tick. Over-the-top and laugh-out-loud daft at times, even when it probably doesn’t mean to be. Tick.

But scary and immersive and involving? Tick, tick and one hundred per cent tick!

When the lights came up at the end, there was a rare buzz about the audience. People were grinning broadly, turning to their friends and exclaiming, ‘OMG!’ and ‘WTAF!’. Complete strangers were striking up conversations. People were chatting animatedly all the way down the stairs. The ushers in the foyer, who hadn’t seen the film, were taken aback by the audience’s animated reaction and one of them asked me about what had provoked this. I can’t remember the last time that happened in a movie theatre. Hatching did what horror is supposed to do. It brought an audience together and through the catharsis of collective fear experienced in safety, made us feel we shared something and understood the world a little better for having spent that ninety minutes together in the dark.

Verdict: You can find a hundred things wrong with this film, but sometimes a movie is more than that, and for the sheer pleasure of the experience I can’t find fault with it. If cinema wants to survive the age of home streaming services, it has to learn from films like Hatching. Go and see it in a cinema if you possibly can. 10/10

Martin Jameson